Re-conceptualizing Performance with 'Active' Notation

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2012

The document on the music stand in front of performing musicians has become reterritorialized by dynamic and interactive notation enabled by computational and communications technologies. The implications are far reaching for how we create, how we play, and how we listen to music. Considering the mediated musical score as a collaborative workspace, issues of awareness and structural relationship models that were latent in traditional scores now become foregrounded. A survey of current practices illustrates different score-based collaboration and communications strategies and provides motivation for a new "anticipatory" interactive scoring system.

Audio Culture

large white sheet of paper is speckled with a few dozen black lines or barssome horizontal, some vertical, some fat, some thin. In its geometric asymmetry, it might be mistaken for a sketch by Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich. In fact, it's a musical score: Earle Brown's "December 1952." Graphically, Brown's piece bears only a distant resemblance to a traditional musical score, as though all the notes and most of the staves had been erased, leaving only a fragmentary scaffold. As musical notation, it is thoroughly idiosyncratic, eschewing the standards of conventional sheet music in favor of a symbolic language all its own. So how does one perform this piece? A separate page of instructions offers only a slim bit of guidance. "For one or more instruments and/or sound-producing media," it reads. "The composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four rotational positions in any sequence." 1 "December 1952" exemplifies a set of new compositional strategies that emerged in the early 1950s and that continue to thrive today. Intersecting with a range of visual art movements and forms-Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art, Video Art, and others-such strategies envision the production of the score as a branch of visual art parallel to and partly independent from musical performance. As such, they challenge the traditional function of the score and propose a new set of relationships between composer, performer, and audience. We generally take for granted that music is something composers "write" and musicians "read," and that musical "writing" and "reading" are distinct sorts of activities. Yet notation is a relatively recent invention in the history of music, as is the distinction between composition and performance. For most of human history, music was strictly an aural art, learned through hearing and transmitted and altered by way of performance itself. Within such a folk culture, music was in constant flux, without finished works or individual composers. 2 While oral cultures adhered to traditional forms, improvisation always played a part and, like evolutionary mutation, caused trad itional forms to continually drift and change. Musical notation was introduced in the Middle Ages as a mnemonic aid for accomplished musicians, a crutch that became ever more necessary with the introduction of multiple melodic lines. Yet economic and political pressures made musical literacy a necessity. The transition from feudalism to capitalism meant the collapse of the courtly patronage system that had supported musicians for centuries. Musicians were thrust onto the open market; and the emergent capitalism favored exchangeable objects rather than intangible, ephemeral forms such as music. Musical notation was thus enlisted as a solution to the problem of how to commodify the inherently transitory nature of sound and the fluid matter of music. Copyright regulations eventually assured the legal status of the musical work as the private property of its author, establishing a division between the work and its performance, the composer and the performer. These conditions served to fix music in the form of stable, finished products and led to the waning of real-time improvisation. The score shifted attention from the ear to the eye, as music became

This submission investigates computer-aided performances in which musicians receive auditory information via earphones. The interaction between audio-scores (musical material sent through earpieces to performers) and visual input (musical notation) changes the traditional relationship between composer, conductor, performer and listener. Audio-scores intend to complement and transform the printed score. They enhance the accuracy of execution of difficult rhythmic or pitch relationships, increase the specificity of instructions given to the performer (for example, in the domain of timbre), and may elicit original and spontaneous responses from the performer in real-time. The present research is inspired by, and positions itself within traditional European notational practices. Through a reflection on the nature and function of notation in a variety of repertoires, this study examines how my own compositional research – and its reliance on audio-scores — relates to and differs from the models considered. Following the realisation of pieces investigating complex rhythms and the use of recorded samples as borrowed/found material, results have proven to be highly effective with a group of vocalists, with works in which audio-scores facilitated the precise realisation of microtonal material. Audio-scores also proved particularly useful in site-specific ‘immersive’ concerts/installations. In these settings, audio-scores mitigate challenges associated with placing musicians at an unusual distances from one another, e.g. around the audience. This submission constitutes an original contribution to knowledge in the field of computer-aided performance in that it demonstrates how musical notation and current ubiquitous audio technologies may be used in tandem in the conception and performance of new works. Recent findings include a Web application currently being developed at IRCAM. The application is based on a local server and allows the synchronous delivery of audio/screen-scores via the browser of the performers’ smarphones, tablets, or computers. Keywords: audio-score, click track, composition, computer-aided performance, earpiece, microtonality, music, notation, performance, screen-score, server, voice.

International Congress Series, 2005

In ordinary print works, accessibility for people with sight difficulties is well promoted. The variety of layout and scale within stave notation, combined with its complexity, has yet to receive such attention. The common solutions are either to photoenlarge the original or not to read the music and play by ear. Advances in music software packages however have made the prospect of producing clearer, more consistent scores quick and attractive. This presentation illustrates this process using Sibeliusk, a music score writing package widely available in the UK and beyond. It also discusses the adoption of modified stave notation taken by three of the leading examination boards in the UK, and current work being undertaken at RNIB to survey musicians who are partially sighted and wish to read printed music as to their preferred style of modification. D 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

GMTH proceedings, 2022

Proceedings TENOR 2015, IRCAM, Paris, 2015

The paper explores the hybridization of notation and instrument as a cognitive movement from representation to enaction. Features of such hybridization are latent in every notation, as a mix of descriptive and prescriptive functions. Current advances in the fields of computer music representation (interactive scores) and New Interfaces for Musical Expression, with precedents in graphic and action-oriented scores, are turning notation into a shared multimodal platform between composer and performer, liquidizing the limit between notation and instrument. We will present this dynamic rapport between scores and interfaces (haptic interactions, INScore, GesTCom, post-Klaus K. Hübler tablature notations of decoupled action-structures) in the light of theoretical models (enaction defined as navigation of affordances from the field of embodied and extended cognition, Leman’s action-reaction cycle extended from instrument-making into notation, Veitl’s conception of software as tablature, At...

2024

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2015

VizScore is an open-source, on-screen notation delivery system designed with the performer’s strengths in mind. By harnessing a performer’s learned skills of reading traditional paper notation and practice of interpreting time from a conductor’s gestures, VizScore creates a notation environment that can integrate seamlessly into any performance situation and help musicians play in time with other instruments, live or computer-generated. The paper reviews some general design principles of on-screen notation as put forth by current experts in the field and offers a new model for on-screen notational display. The paper then assesses results from a comparative study between VizScore and related on-screen notation software, before describing future goals. Software like VizScore can help push both performers and composers to stretch the current paradigmatic boundaries while yielding accurate results in the concert environment.

Action-Based Approaches in Popular Music Education, 2021

In the music education model in the United States, music literacy is often defined simply as the ability to read and write Western staff music notation (Asmus, 2004) with particular emphasis on the former. In this chapter, I’ll briefly trouble this notion of a singular definition of music literacy and offer ways to develop musical fluency in a number of musical literacies: aural, analytical, technological, and written. This will be demonstrated through three activities that help set the stage for the young musician to explore notational models beyond Western staff notation. Some of these “other” notational styles include chord charts, lyric sheets, Roman numerals, Nashville numbers, piano rolls, rhythmic cues, etc., – styles one might come across on the gig and in the recording studio, but would be hard-pressed to find in the secondary instrumental classroom. In considering my early experiences in music education (and with notation, in particular) how might we expand beyond a singular definition of musical literacy to develop aspects of musical fluency? The overarching purpose of the following activities is to familiarize students with some of these musical literacies and notational models in an effort to support them in developing musical fluency, that is, the “ability to engage musically with others in varied contexts” (Tobias, 2016, p. 129, when discussing Swanwick, 1999).