A new framework to preserve Tagore songs

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Misra, Chandan | Bhattacharya, Baidurya | Basu, Anupam

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering Civil Engineering, IIT Kharagpur Kharagpur – 721 302, India. chandan.misra1@gmail.com | Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Kharagpur Kharagpur – 721 302, India. baidurya@civil.iitkgp.ernet.in | Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur Kharagpur – 721 302, India. anupam@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in

Abstract: This paper deals with a new framework for archiving and annotating Rabindra Sangeet (‘Rabindra Sangeet’, n.d) (known as Tagore songs in English) written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore. This framework has a layered structure with each layer having a specific defined functionality. XML (’XML Tutorial’, n.d) is used to construct the framework to store different synchronized layers of information in a simple manner. These layers contain notational, audio/MIDI (‘Learn About MIDI’, n.d), catalogue information including structure of musicsheet. MusicXML (‘MusicXML Definition’, n.d) and IEEE P1599 (‘IEEE Standard P1599-2008’, 12 June 2008) standard are two prominent structured formats for defining western music. The inadequate nature of these two formats for representing Indian music system (including Rabindra Sangeet) makes this new framework relevant. This paper gives a brief description of the new framework and a simple application for archiving Tagore songs in MIDI and notational format. There are two ultimate purposes of this work. The first one is to generate the MIDI files of all the songs with various instruments. The second one is to store the characters of the musicsheet in the XML file so that data can be retrieved and presented in a desktop and web environment.

Keywords: Rabindra Sangeet, layered framework, musicsheet, MIDI, API, Unicode

DOI: 10.3233/WDL-120055

Journal: World Digital Libraries - An international journal, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 63-72, 2010