The concept of interactive music: The new standard IEEE P1599 / MX

Music is much more than passive listening to a binary file. It can easily become a complete experience, the adventure of entering a new world, of understanding a narration and seeing images. Music has always incorporated the newest technology of a given epoch, and the marriage with computer science is at least as old as the early attempts by Mozart and Haydn. For at least forty centuries in all cultures, music has used symbols to represent its contents and give hints for its performance, thus this standard is the continuation of this tradition with its use of human and machine readable symbols using the XML language. This article illustrates the possibilities offered by the new standard IEEE P1599, locally known as project MX, through a few applications meant to show its flexibility and its role as enabling technology.