The Song Remains the Same: Lossless Conversion and Streaming of MIDI to RDF and Back

Abstract

Abstract. In this demo, we explore the potential of RDF as a representation format for digital music. Digital music is broadly used today in many professional music production environments. For decades, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) has been the standard for digital music exchange between musicians and devices, albeit not in a Web friendly way. We show the potential of expressing digital music as Linked Data, using our midi2rdf suite of tools to convert and stream digital music in MIDI format to RDF. The conversion allows for lossless round tripping: we can reconstruct a MIDI file identical to the original using its RDF representation. The streaming uses an existing, novel generative audio matching algorithm that we use to broadcast, with very low latency, RDF triples of MIDI events coming from arbitrary analog instruments.

List.MID: A MIDI-Based Benchmark for Evaluating RDF Lists

“…in strict sequential order to preserve musical coherence. Consequently, we use the midi2rdf algorithm proposed in [17] to generate RDF graphs from MIDI files; and we extend this algorithm here in order to encode RDF lists of musical events supporting the list data models discussed in Section 3.1. Figure 7 shows an excerpt of the MIDI ontology used by the original midi2rdf algorithm.…”

“…An inspection of this result allows users to select a MIDI identifier of the chosen size; this identifier can be used in a second query 13 to download an RDF dump for the MIDI file. This dump can be transformed into an input MIDI file with the included rdf2midi command [17].…”

SPARQL2Git: Transparent SPARQL and Linked Data API Curation via Git

“…SPARQL2Git's GUI saves users from git interaction commands, and neatly documents SPARQL queries with relevant metadata (such as their target endpoint). SPARQL2Git allows to easily test the functionality of SPARQL queries from applications through their Linked Data APIs, using grlc [6]. SPARQL2Git's architecture consists of two parts: a Web front-end GUI; and a Python-flask backend, which deals with (1) receiving calls from and updating the GUI, and (2) manages authentication, repository access, and commits with GitHub's API.…”

“…SPARQL2Git transforms the contents of the data supplied in this screen (Figs. 1 and 2) to grlc's notation for Linked Data APIs [6]. This way, Linked Data APIs can be generated on the fly right after users commit changes to their queries.…”

“…In the CEDAR [4] and CLARIAH [3] projects, we have adopted a Gitcentric approach, in which we curate queries independently of consuming applications. This query centralization has decoupled SPARQL queries from the various applications, like map visualizations 2 , query interfaces 3 , and even on-the-fly generated Linked Data APIs 4 with grlc [6], that depend on them to function. Moreover, by using Git and the API of Git repository managers such as GitHub, we enable versioning, unique identification, and de-referenceability of queries at a fine-grained, commit level, among other features of modern distributed version control systems.…”