Making Music Accessible: Introduction to the Special Thematic Session

Musical material is a very rich corpus of data. Data with all kinds of features, entities, relations and a potentially endless number of abstraction levels on all these perspectives. It is therefore important to establish which set of elements we are going to use for the preservation, processing and provision of music; which features are redundant; which building blocks are mandatory; and how many can be shared amongst all of them. These considerations hold especially true for the community that is dependent on the accessibility of music. The area of music encoding is moving towards greater unification and co-ordination of effort and it is important that accessibility requirements are built into design processes. This also requires organisations working in this area to make their requirements clear and to participate in emerging standards.