Advances and perspectives in Web technologies for music representation

Web technologies are quickly evolving in order to provide an increasing set of services to Internet users. Multimedia is one of the fields where the availability of high-speed networks, innovative devices and new technological approaches is noticeably arousing the interest of content producers and consumers. In this regard, it is worth mentioning new HTML5 elements to embed multimedia, recent evolutions of e-book formats towards interactivity and hypermedia, and the establishment of new W3C groups addressing specific media-related issues. Such technological advances can have a deep impact on digital cultures, as it regards both content production and dissemination on the Web. The current challenge is to combine new hardware and software technologies in order to radically improve and customize content experience. After discussing a number of approaches to music representation, this paper aims to review the most relevant Web technologies already available and to propose new Web applications addressing music in an advanced multimedia context.