School of Informatics and School of Music
Indiana University • Bloomington, IN 47405

Offices: School of Informatics, Informatics Building 307
Voice: +1 812-856-3660; Fax: -856-4764
Cook Music Library, Simon Hall M060B
Voice: -856-0129; Fax: -855-3843

E-mail: donbyrd(at)indiana.edu

I am a Visiting Associate Professor of Informatics at Indiana University, a member of the Music Informatics Group. I'm also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Music, associated with the Department of Music Theory. My work currently focuses on music-encoding systems and on music representation, especially for symbolic music notations. My research interests also include symbolic music information retrieval (music IR), digital music libraries and digital libraries in general, user interfaces in general, and music and digital audio applications. Here is a short biography and a list of my publications. (Music has specialized requirements for references; I generally use my own reference style for music.)

Teaching. I currently teach two graduate seminars, Introduction to Music Informatics and Music Information Representation, Search, and Retrieval, in the School of Informatics; both are cross-listed as music-theory courses. In early 2003, I taught a course similar to the latter in the School of Music; to my knowledge, that was the first course on music IR offered anywhere. See my Teaching Page.

Music notation, especially but not solely Conventional Western Music Notation, is something I've spent a great deal of time thinking about and working with over the last 35 years. My dissertation, Music Notation by Computer, is available online in scanned page-image form, or see my publication list for information on obtaining a bound copy. I created the musical examples for Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Goedel, Escher, Bach with my early music-printing program SMUT, and I was the principal designer and lead programmer for the commercial music-score editor Nightingale. The limits of conventional Western notation are fascinating and sometimes revealing. Have you ever wondered what the highest, lowest, shortest, or longest note ever written is? Or what the densest chord, or the shortest or longest piece is? I have; in fact, I've been working for years on a list of Extremes of Conventional Music Notation. Drawing on that list and a collection of rule-breaking notation in my dissertation, here is a small Gallery of Interesting Music Notation.

Speaking of music notation, Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a technology that has great potential but that hasn't gotten much attention so far. To help out, I've created a table of OMR systems, and I've done some research, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, on the accuracy of current systems and how they might be improved. I'm continuing this research under the auspices of the MeTAMuSE project mentioned below.

It is rarely noticed that music IR covers a wide spectrum of problems, some far more difficult and/or ill-defined than others. My Similarity Scale for Content-Based Music IR attempts to clarify matters. I also maintain a music-IR and informatics bibliography focused on my own interests. I've written a "white paper" on Musical Themes and Occurrences of Melodic Confounds that gives statistics on occurrences of some common features that make even searching for simple melodies or fragments of them difficult, especially with music in symbolic form.

Evaluation of music-IR other music-informatics systems is still in an early stage; one reason it hasn't advanced more is clearly a lack of test databases or collections available to researchers. To help things along, I maintain a list of Candidate Music IR Test Collections. In some ways, the situation has improved substantially in the last few years, and my list may not be as useful as it once was, but the situation is complex. In particular, MIREX makes a number of large test collections available to researchers, but they can be accessed only through the M2K/D2K programming system MIREX uses.

Grants and Conferences. I was Principal Investigator of a grant from the NSF-led International Digital Libraries initiative for Online Music Retrieval and Searching: this project was joint work with Tim Crawford and others at Kings College London and the University of Massachusetts. I was also General Chair of the NSF-sponsored International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval held in Massachusetts in 2000. This highly-successful meeting was the first ever to focus specifically on music information retrieval; it led to an annual series of meetings, of which the next is the Eighth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, to be held in Vienna, Austria next fall (2007). I'm currently Co-Principal Investigator, with Tim Crawford and Geraint Wiggins, of the MeTAMuSE (Methodologies and Technologies for Advanced Musical Score Encoding) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Professional Links Music IR Conferences and Related Activities Gerd Castan's Music Notation Links MIR Systems: A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems music-ir.org: University of Illinois site Worldwide Internet Music Resources IU Center for Electronic and Computer Music Music Cataloging at Yale Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary

Other Links (roughly decreasing order of seriousness!) The Hunger Site: give food for free to hungry people American Friends Service Committee Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Schneier on Security Common Errors in English Hoosier Heights Climbing Gym Rock Climbing.com South Pole Live Camera Structured Procrastination