45. Enabling Interactive and Interoperable Semantic Music Applications

New interactive music services have emerged, but many of them use proprietary file formats. In order to enable interoperability among these services, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) issued a new standard, the so-called MPEG-A: Interactive Music Application Format (IM AF).

The purpose of this chapter is to review the IM AF standard and its features, and also to provide a detailed description of the design and implementation of an IM AF codec and its integration into a popular open source analysis, annotation and visualization audio tool known as Sonic Visualiser. This is followed by a discussion highlighting the benefits of their combined features, such as automatic chords or melody extraction time-aligned with the song's lyrics. Furthermore, this integration provides the semantic music research community with a testbed enabling further development and comparison of new Sonic Visualiser plug-ins, e. g., from singing voice-to-text conversion with automatic lyrics highlighting for karaoke applications, to source separation-based music instrument extraction from a mixed song.