… Or does it actually tell time? Time-related methodological directions for music information systems

After having been involved in music information management design for 14 years, I am still searching for the ultimate design. Thus, presently, my work has involved looking at the methodologies used for designing systems and data structures. Obviously the central question before starting to design any music application is how to represent music internally and furthermore, how to represent time. In order to understand the complexity of these questions, it can be helpful to initially look at music representation schemes outside of the digital world: music notations or text encoding in the pre-computer age. A look at current available schemes will show how much of this functionality is presently supported and functional and timing aspects of music representation schemes are defined. The pros and cons of specific design choices and methodologies are outlined. This paper is part of this work and looks specifically at issues around temporal aspects of music representation