Database to catalog classic music

Modern technology has done much for music-lovers. Thanks to computers, users are able to download, catalog and share most types of music online. And now, one IU professor hopes to make classical and scholarly music just as available. \nIn June, Donald Byrd, a visiting associate professor at IU, was awarded a $395,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to start work on a music database project with two of his colleagues, Tim Crawford and Geraint Wiggins of England. \nThe first phase of the project, Methodologies and Technologies for Advanced Musical Score Encoding, started in July, and the funding will last two years, Byrd said. \nByrd said he hopes in the final stages, the project will present a knowledge database of scholarly music for composers and musicologists. \n"All three of us have a background in music, and we realized the shortcomings of encoding music in computers, mostly because that level of quality is not one that would make a musicologist happy," he said. \nByrd said for most of the beginning stages, he and his colleagues are working to develop technology that will be able to encode musical scores into a digital form that computers can use. The music database is a plan for the future. \n"This database will consist of music in which (the user) knows where it came from, the publisher and who provided it," Byrd said. "For example, there are many variations of (Polish composer Frédéric) Chopin's music, but there is no single first edition. This database hopes to overcome that." \nHe said this project will reach out to those most interested in classical music, which would most likely include music scholars, various performers and even graduate students. \nByrd also mentioned Google's project to scan a large library of music that would be offered publicly for computer users. However, he said that project has been put on hold as music publishers have filed suit against Google.