GUIDO Music Notation : Towards an adequate representation of score level music

GUIDO Music Notation is a novel approach for adequately representing score-level music. Using a plain-text human-readable and platform independent format, the GUIDO design is based on a conceptually simple, yet powerful and easily extensible formalism. GUIDO Notation is focused on musical and logical concepts, but also supports notational and performance-related aspects within a coherent formal framework. The key feature of our design is adequacy, meaning that using GUIDO, simple musical concepts can be expressed in a simple way, while more complex musical notions require more complex representations. GUIDO Notation can be used for a broad range of applications, including notation software, compositional and analytical systems and tools, musical databases, and music on the World Wide Web. In this paper we introduce the basic concepts and features of GUIDO Music Notation and illustrate these giving some simple examples. We also compare GUIDO with other music representation formats like DARMS, MIDI, and NIFF. Based on our own experience, we belief that GUIDO Music Notation will prove to be very useful, both as a music representation format and as a data exchange format for musical information.