MIDI (1.0) is more equivalent to NES/GameBoy-style sprites. It was designed almost exclusively with piano-like keyboard controllers in mind, suffers from a lot of 80's-era hardware limitations, heavily biased towards western music, relies completely on the sound bank for actual rendering (you can't even set your own pixels on a sprite - you can only say "paint a Mario here"), relies in some places on vendor-specific extensions, overall really it hasn't aged as nicely as say TCP.
A true "SVG, but for music" kind of equivalent would be an insanely interesting and challenging project. I'm not even sure if it should strive for more of a middle ground (so it can gain widespread adoption), or for flexibility (so it doesn't constrain creativity and allows expressiveness).
MIDI (1.0) is more equivalent to NES/GameBoy-style sprites. It was designed almost exclusively with piano-like keyboard controllers in mind, suffers from a lot of 80's-era hardware limitations, heavily biased towards western music, relies completely on the sound bank for actual rendering (you can't even set your own pixels on a sprite - you can only say "paint a Mario here"), relies in some places on vendor-specific extensions, overall really it hasn't aged as nicely as say TCP.
A true "SVG, but for music" kind of equivalent would be an insanely interesting and challenging project. I'm not even sure if it should strive for more of a middle ground (so it can gain widespread adoption), or for flexibility (so it doesn't constrain creativity and allows expressiveness).
Also check out: MIDI 2.0, OSC.