Music Navigation with Symbols and Layers. Toward Content Browsing with IEEE 1599 XML Encoding

Music is much more than listening to audio encoded in some unreadable binary format. It is, instead, an adventure similar to reading a book and entering its world, complete with a story, plot, sound, images, texts, and plenty of related data with, for instance, historical, scientific, literary, and musicological contents. Navigation of this world, such as that of an opera, a jazz suite and jam session, a symphony, a piece from non-Western culture, is possible thanks to the specifications of new standard IEEE 1599, IEEE Recommended Practice for Defining a Commonly Acceptable Musical Application Using XML, which uses symbols in language XML and music layers to express all i…