Querying Music Notation

Abstract

We consider the emerging field of music score libraries, where documents rely on a music notation markup language such as MusicXML or MEI. We propose to model as synchronized time-series the music structure that can be extracted from such documents, together with an algebra that operates in closed form and allows manipulations, restructurings, and combinations of music scores stored in a database. We formally present the model, its algebraic operators, and finally show how our approach can serve as a building block for a query and analytic language on large collections of XML-encoded music scores.