Jon, Thanks for posting that notice. I'll check it out. A good XML representation, widely adopted, means we could soon be seeing browser plugins that can display the score for any coded representation such as ABC. That will go a long way towards helping musicians share lead sheets and scores. Of course an acceptable XML standard has to be a superset of all other encoding schemes.

I agree with John that lyrics support is an important feature and DMcG has identified a key problem with lyrics. If one is looking at a score or lead sheet, it's useful to have the lyrics included in the score in such a way that each syllable is associated with the correct note or beat and the duration of held syllables is indicated. In all the lyrics entery schemes I'm aware of, this generally means that the lyrics must be broken down into syllables with (perhaps several) dashes in between them to act as dummy syllables when lining the lyrics up with the notes. Including lyrics in a displayed or printed score also requires that the note spacing must by dynamically adjusted to accomodate the lyrics.

Within XML it would be possible to “tag” particular characters or syllables in such a way as to provide for correct score alignment without requiring the tags to be visible when the lyrics are displayed by themselves in poetic verse form. The tags would be generated using a graphical interface in which the user just “dragged” a connector between a character or syllable to a note head in a score and the tag would be generated in the lyrics to tie them to the score. There may be better ways, this is just off the top of my head.

Mary, I have some recorded examples of music that was composed by a computer program and then played by an orchestra. I also have examples of music that was both composed and generated (played) by a computer. All of the examples painfully demonstrate the inability of human researchers to express, mathematically, what makes music enjoyable to the human ear.

      - Mark