MusicXML Definition

Version 1.0

Overview - What's New - Files - More Information

Overview

"Word-processing and spreadsheet programs have been sharing formats for years, so you can write in one program and share your results with people who prefer something different. Finally, the musical world has realised that it needs the same thing. Its name is MusicXML." - David Hewson, The Sunday Times, August 29, 2004

Recordare has developed MusicXML technology to create an Internet-friendly method of publishing musical scores, enabling musicians and music fans to get more out of their online music.

MusicXML is a universal translator for common Western musical notation from the 17th century onwards. It is designed as an interchange format for notation, analysis, retrieval, and performance applications. The MusicXML format is open for use by anyone under a royalty-free license, and is supported by over 35 applications:

We have tried to learn from the mistakes of past music notation interchange efforts by 1) basing the format on the two strongest academic formats available, MuseData and Humdrum, and 2) testing the format by writing usable software from the beginning of the development process.

You are invited to join our MusicXML discussion group to learn more about MusicXML and offer your comments and suggestions.

"MusicXML is without question the most mature effort so far in using XML to encode music." - Darin Stewart, Electronic Musician, December 2003

What's New

MusicXML 1.0 was released in January 2004. It adds support for guitar frames, more extensive support for editorial levels, sound attributes for pan, elevation, repeats, and pedals, and enhanced formatting for fingerings, brackets, accidentals, and augmentation dots. The MusicXML version history provides more details of changes since version 0.6 shipped with the first products supporting MusicXML.

Recordare's Dolet software currently translates between Finale, MusicXML, and MuseData formats, plus one-way translation from Sibelius to MusicXML. If you would like to see MusicXML converters for other file formats, please let us know. If you would like to see converters for other commercial programs, please contact those software companies too.

Files

A MusicXML tutorial for software developers is available in both HTML and PDF format, including a MusicXML FAQ. This is the easiest starting point for learning about MusicXML.

A set of 15 musical examples is available in XML and graphic formats. These include songs for voice and piano, a song for voice and guitar tablature, and some instrumental music. An earlier MusicXML example, "Mut" from Franz Schubert's Winterreise, is also available in several formats, including XML, MIDI, PDF, and Finale files.

If you start doing a MusicXML implementation, you will need to refer to the actual MusicXML document type definitions (DTDs). These are available online, distributed under the MusicXML Document Type Definition Public License 1.02.

All the component DTDs are listed at the MusicXML DTD Index. Most browsers do not display DTDs directly, so you will probably want to look at the HTML versions of these files.

The two main top-level DTDs are partwise.dtd and timewise.dtd. Two XSLT stylesheets (parttime.xsl and timepart.xsl) are provided to convert between the two formats. Multiple movements or other musical collections are represented using opus.dtd. The opus document contains XLinks to individual scores, and will evolve to include more detailed reference and musicological information. There is also a midixml.dtd for representing Standard MIDI Files in XML.

Recordare's Dolet for Finale plug-in translates back and forth between Finale for Windows and MusicXML. A 30-day trial version of this software is available at our download page, along with the MusicXML tutorial and DTDs.

More Information

To keep updated on MusicXML, you may subscribe to our e-mail announcement list, our MusicXML discussion list, or both.

There are now many publications from authors all over the world describing their MusicXML experiences and evaluations, together with press coverage about MusicXML and Recordare. Here are some of the more detailed papers and presentations from Recordare:

MusicXML: An Internet-Friendly Format for Sheet Music is available on the XML 2001 Conference Proceedings web site (December 2001).
MusicXML in Practice: Issues in Translation and Analysis was presented at the MAX 2002 conference on Musical Applications Using XML (September 2002). The slides from the conference presentation are also available in PDF format. The XQuery examples have been updated to reflect the November 15, 2002 working draft.
Our presentation on MusicXML and MUSICNETWORK from the MUSICNETWORK 2002 workshop is available in PDF format.
MusicXML: An Open Format for Music Notation, an overview from our OSCON birds of a feather session, is available in PDF format (July 2002).
MusicXML for Notation and Analysis appears in The Virtual Score: Representation, Retrieval, Restoration. Published jointly by the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities and The MIT Press, it is now available from Amazon and other bookstores (September 2001).

We welcome your questions and comments about MusicXML at:

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Last updated October 4, 2004.