Conclusion
MusicXML has built on the collective work of the XML and music representation communities to become the most widely adopted symbolic music interchange format since MIDI. As the language develops, it will encounter further challenges in the areas of translation and analysis. Our commercial experience to date bodes well for handling translation issues as MusicXML expands to include more data for tablature, percussion notation, and sequencer applications. Our recent XQuery experience gives us new hope that industry-standard XML database tools, combined with MusicXML-based representations, will provide powerful new tools for problems in musical data analysis and information retrieval.
