An Architecture for distributed multimedia database systems

In the past few years considerable demand for user oriented multimedia information systems has developed. These systems must provide a rich set of functionality so that new, complex, and interesting applications can be addressed. This places considerable importance on the management of diverse data types including text, images, audio and video. These requirements generate the need for a new generation of distributed heterogeneous multimedia database systems. In this paper we identify a set of functional requirements for a multimedia server considering database management, object synchronization and integration, and multimedia query processing. A generalization of the requirements to a distributed system is presented, and some of our current research and developing activities are discussed

A system for the analysis of musical data

The role of music analysis is to enlighten our understanding of a piece of music. The role of musical performance analysis is to help us understand how a performer interprets a piece of music. The current work provides a tool which combines music analysis with performance analysis. By combining music and performance analysis in one system new questions can be asked of a piece of music: how is the structure of a piece reflected in the performance and how can the performance enlighten our understanding of the piece's structure? The current work describes a unified database which can store and present musical score alongside associated performance data and musical analysis. Using a general purpose representation language, Performance Mark-up Language (PML), aspects of performance are recorded and analysed. Data thus acquired from one project is made available to others. Presentation involves high-quality scores suitably annotated with the requested information. Such output is easily and directly accessible to musicians, performance scientists and analysts. We define a set of data structures and operators which can operate on musical pitch and musical time, and use them to form the basis of a query language for a musical database. The database can store musical information (score, gestural data, etc.). Querying the database results in annotations of the musical score. The database is capable of storing musical score information and performance data and cross-referencing them. It is equipped with the necessary primitives to execute music-analytical queries, and highlight notes identified from the score and display performance data alongside the score