selection of about 20 early musical codes of some importance was presented in Eleanor Selfridge-Field’s famous book Beyond MIDI (Selfridge-Field, 1997) more than 20 years ago. Wikipedia lists 50 different file formats1 used by current notation software (Wikipedia: Comparison of scorewriters); the list does not include older software such as SCORE or codes not supported by the notation software listed; for instance, EsAC, Plaine and Easie, **Kern and MEI are not mentioned. A useful and commonly used model to distinguish classes of information in music encoding was proposed with the Standard Music Description Language, identifying four distinct domains of information: the visual domain (score information), the gestural domain (performance information), the analytical domain (theoretical information), and the logical domain described as “the underlying musical information, which abstractly represents compositional intent’ (Newcomb 1991, 76)”. To be considered genuine music notation codes – not just graphical descriptions of the notation – encoding formats must include the logical domain to some extent in order to describe core musical elements such as pitch and duration. This is the main reason for not regarding PDF or other visually oriented formats as musical encodings. Apart from the logical contents, each code has certain strengths and weaknesses depending on the purpose for which it was invented. Some codes are especially suitable for describing music as represented in the visual domain (Lilypond, SCORE), others focus on the analytical domain (**Kern) and others still on the gestural domain, i.e. performed music (MIDI). In contrast to the symbolic representations mentioned, MIDI may actually be labelled a semi-symbolic approach to music encoding as it contains recorded performance information such as timing and dynamics as well as basic symbolic information such as note pitch. The primary focus of MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) is the encoding of music documents for archival or academic purposes; like a
1 Strictly speaking not the same as encoding formats, however. In principle, the same encoding may be stored in various file formats.
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