The Music Addressability API: A draft specification for addressing portions of music notation on the web

Abstract

This paper describes an Application Programming Interface (API) for addressing music notation on the web regardless of the format in which it is stored. This API was created as a method for addressing and extracting specific portions of music notation published in machine-readable formats on the web. Music notation, like text, can be "addressed" in new ways in a digital environment, allowing scholars to identify and name structures of various kinds, thus raising such questions as how can one virtually "circle" some music notation? How can a machine interpret this "circling" to select and retrieve the relevant music notation? The API was evaluated by: 1) creating an implementation of the API for documents in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format; and by 2) remodelling a dataset of music analysis statements from the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project (Haverford College) by using the API to connect the analytical statements with the portion of notaiton they refer to. Building this corpus has demonstrated that the Music Addressability API is capable of modelling complex analytical statements containing references to music notation.