Representing Traditional Korean Music Notation in XML

XML promises to provide a powerful interoperable general framework for the development of music representation systems. Unfortunately current XML encoding systems for music focus almost exclusively on Western music from the 17 century onwards, and on the Western notation system, Common Music Notation (CMN). This is regrettably limiting, with cultural, theoretical, and practical consequences for MIR. In order to ensure that music information retrieval (MIR) systems have full theoretic generality, and wide practical application, we have begun a project to explore the representation, in XML, of a genre of traditional Korean music which has a distinctive notation system called Chôngganbo. Our project takes seriously the specific notational expression of musical intention and intends to ultimately contribute to the analysis of theoretical issues in music representation, as well as to the improvement of methods for representing Korean music specifically.