Music Definition Language & Music Manipulation Language: A Coding Scheme for Music Representation and Storage

Abstract

There are a number of existing music data storage formats and a number of existing music manipulating formats, each of which possess certain features and limitations. Thus, for the new coding scheme introduced, Music Definition Language (MDL) and Music Manipulation Language (MML), we analyse how well it can act as storage media. We carried out experiments on whether the new coding scheme can make the music easier to represent by comparing the sound waveform, the storage data size and other relevant features. The result shows that the file size, of 14.3kB (size on disk: 15.0kB) for the first 18 seconds, is larger than a MIDI file but relatively small compared to audio file such as an MP3 file. More importantly, the soundwave that MDL and MML generated is better than MIDI files, as it is closer to audio files and able to do more variations. Therefore, the overall performance of MDL and MML lies between symbolic-coded files and audio files.