Music data format for polyphonic music visualization with Processing

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I am interested in visualizing melodic contours of polyphonic music with Processing. It is still unclear to me, though, what the most convenient format for imported data (pitch and onset/duration) would be: tabular (e.g. Humdrum), XML (e.g. MEI, musicXML), or JSON? Maybe another format?

Any suggestions/thoughts on this would be really helpful! Thanks.

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Henri Augusto On

Using MIDI files would be optimal, because of the combination of those 3 reasons

  1. MIDI is widely used. You can export a .midi file from pratically any score editor plus you can create your own by recording the input from a midi instrument.
  2. You can already find .midi files of iconic polyphonic music on the web (Bach's counterpoints, Reinaissance vocal music, etc)
  3. It just contain music/playback information. It doesn't contain notation information like music XML. So if you just want to see pitches and note position/duration (like in this video) then .midi will contain just what you need
  4. You can use the Java Midi Package in Processing and it already contains everything you need to read the MIDI files.

While other formats might also apply for 1, 2, 3 or 4 only MIDI applies for all of them.

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Kevin Workman On

The best answer I can give you is that you should put together a simple hello world program that tests out each format and see which one you like the best.

In the end, you're the one that has to deal with the code, so only you can really decide on the best format.