Learning, Teaching, and Making Music Together in the COVID-19 Era Through IEEE 1599

IEEE 1599 is an international standard aiming to describe music and music-related information through a multi-layer approach. The idea is to organize multiple and heterogeneous materials related to a single musical piece within a hierarchical and highly-interconnected structure expressed via the XML syntax, so as to support multimodal and synchronized experience of music content. Another relevant feature is the possibility to enjoy IEEE 1599 materials via network, thanks to ad hoc Web applications already publicly available. This paper focuses on IEEE 1599 applicability to music education and geographically-distributed performance in this period of self-isolation and home schooling due to Coronavirus disease. Moreover, the lesson learned from the experimentation during the emergency phase is inspiring some improvements for the format, which is currently under revision by the IEEE Working Group for XML Musical Application.