Balisage Paper: The Road Not Taken

MusicXML, Other Notation Standards, and a Case Study

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2026
August 3 - 7, 2026

The materials listed below were provided by the speaker as supplements to a presentation at Balisage. These materials may include the slides or visuals used in the presentation; supplementary material, such as code samples or a demonstration application; and/or the paper accompanying the presentation (if it has not been provided in XML). These materials have been zipped for easy download and are identified by a brief description of the contents. The materials themselves are untouched, that is, they have not been tested or edited by Balisage: The Markup Conference or by Mulberry Technologies, Inc. As such, they are included on this website AS IS, i.e., as provided by the speaker, with no warranties, express or otherwise, made by Balisage or Mulberry.

Slides and Materials

×

Cashner, Andrew A. Lilypond Music-Notation Software in the Digital-Humanities Toolbox. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 18.2 (2024). doi:https://doi.org/10.63744/rfcvh3zcuxby.

×

Good, M. and Recordare, L.L.C. Lessons from the Adoption of MusicXML as an Interchange Standard. In Proceedings of XML 2006. https://www.musicxml.com/publications/makemusic-recordare/xml-2006

×

Maxwell, John Turner, and Severo M. Ornstein. Mockingbird: A composer's amanuensis. No. CSL-83-2. XEROX Corporation, Palo Alto Research Centers, 1983.

×

Music Encoding Initiative. MEI: The Music Encoding Initiative Guidelines (PDF). 5.1, Zenodo, 23 Jan. 2025. doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14795519.

×

W3C Music Notation Community Group. MusicXML 4.0: Final Community Group Report. World Wide Web Consortium, 1 June 2021. http://www.w3.org/2021/06/musicxml40/.

×

Sherzod Muzaffarovich Mustafoev. The Interconnection between Sounds, Musical Memory, and the Sense of Melody and Harmony. European Review of Contemporary Arts and Humanities 1(4):3-8 (Nov. 2025).

×

Newcomb, S.R., Kipp, N.A. and Newcomb, V.T. The ‘HyTime’ hypermedia/time-based document structuring language. Communications of the ACM, 34(11):67-83 (1991). doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/125490.125495.

×

Simons, Michael Roy, and Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar. Is Invisible XML Ready for College Students? Trying iXML and XProc on a Music Analysis Project in an Undergraduate Text Analysis Course. Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2025, Washington, DC, August 4 - 8, 2025. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2025. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 30 (2025). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol30.Beshero-Bondar01.

×

Thompson, Randall. Frostiana: Seven Country Songs. E.C. Schirmer Music, 1965.