IML-MIR

Intermediate Musical Languages - Music Information Retrieval (IML-MIR)

IML-MIR, created at Princeton University in the mid-1970s, was intended to enable the encoding of monophonic music from the Middle Ages. Although it was also used on polyphonic repertories, each voice was treated as if it were monodic. (It could no handle simultaneities within a single voice.) It was extended to the cell structure of Braille Music Notation (BMN). Output of printed scores was designer for plotters (as was usual at that time). Arthur Mendel, a Bach scholar at Princeton, was the author of most descriptions (1969-1973) of the language. Tobias Robinson (1967), Michael Kassler (1968, 1969) and J. Horace Patrick (1974, 1975) were among its student developers. Robinson addressed the then novel idea of accommodating programming tools to use in music analysis. Kassler's focus was on algorithms. Patrick's interests included suspension-discovery and interchange to Braille MN.