Gregory Maxwell wrote:
As far as the conversion of notation into sound, thats what the MPEG4 structured audio group has tackled. Uses what is effectively midi for its score. It's totally useless unless you're in to the electroacoustic music scene.
That's not actually the MPEG group I'm thinking of. The one I had in mind is the Ad Hoc Group on Symbolic Music Representation, which is attempting to come up with a consensus symbolic-representation format. Some of their publications discuss in some more detail why this is a difficult problem, and why existing systems do not solve it: http://www.interactivemusicnetwork.org/mpeg-ahg/
-Mark