Defining an XML format for sound synthesis

Most symbolic music representation methods rest upon the bases of Western staff notation, or consist in the adoption of event-driven protocols (such as MIDI, which has become a de facto standard for music data storage and interchange). This imposes constraints to what kind of sounds can be generated, limiting their dynamic properties. Neither "traditional" sheet music nor MIDI include information on timbric properties beyond an attribute indicating the instrument name. In this paper, we present a first approach towards the development of XML-based music synthesis systems. The idea is to describe the sound synthesis parameters by means of tags and attributes. We also show how this representation can be transformed into the Pure Data file format.