SangeetXML: An XML Format for Score Retrieval for Indic Music

Efficient retrieval of score information from a large set of XML-encoded scores and lyrics in an XML database requires such music data to be stored in a well-structured and systematic technique. Current search engines for Indic music (Tagore songs in the present context) retrieves only metadata and lacks scores and lyric retrieval schemes. Being vastly different from its western counterpart, an Indic music piece is required to be encoded in a different way than the XML format used for western music like MusicXML. Such encoding requires a proper understanding of the structure of the music sheet and its careful implementation in XML. In this paper, we propose the development of an XML-based format, SangeetXML, for exchanging and retrieving Indic music information from a theoretical 2D matrix model Swaralipi. We implement SangeetXML by formatting a sample of Rabindra Sangeet (read Tagore Songs in English) compositions and highlights the feasibility of an easy and quick retrieval system based on SangeetXML through XQuery, the de-facto standard for querying XML-encoded data.