Uploaded May 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Visiting Researcher Miller Puckette discusses contemporary approaches to scores for electronic music at to show the musical structure of a piece in a way that a composer can use to organize musical ideas, and also as a data structure that can be transformed by the computer into musical sound, possibly incorporating live, real-time inputs from musicians.

http://msp.ucsd.edu/
research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cerenem/projects/creativecodinglab
cerenem.org

Electronic music over the past century has developed at a rate that far outpaces our ability to develop suitable notation systems for it. At least since the early 1950s, composers have tried to find ways of organizing electronic sounds using marks on paper, and since the 1970s researchers have been trying to design a flexible way to represent electronic scores graphically using a computer. (The Pure Data software system that I currently develop started out as one such attempt). In this talk, I'll try to show why the problem has proved so difficult. One central reason is that any such score system must simultaneously serve two purposes: to show the musical structure of a piece in a way that a composer can use to organize musical ideas, and also as a data structure that can be transformed by the computer into musical sound, possibly incorporating live, real-time inputs from musicians. These considerations often come into tension with each other, and with limitations imposed by the physical interface that a computer presents to a user, and by the inability of an image to accurately represent a sound. I'll assess the current situation and make some suggestions for future work in this area.