The New Standard IEEE 1599, Introduction and Examples

IEEE 1599 is a new standard to encode music with XML symbols. It offers two important original characteristics compared to existing standards of the worlds of music, musicology and computer applications to this art and science. On one side, the encoding is in the form of symbols that can be read both by machines and humans. On the other, it allows the realization of applications in which all aspects of music, such as audio and sound, graphical representation, historical data, performance indications, represented thanks to the new concept of layers, are fully integrated, synchronized and can be accessed both individually and as parts of a whole. The article will give a brief description of the standard and of applications that have been built to show its power.