Writing Time

The main goal of composition is often considered to be the structuring of time. In computer environments for composition, this is often treated just like another digital parameter.

Among the different functions in the OpenMusic environment, the maquette is certainly one of the significant new features in this domain. The maquette is a programming interface whose graphical characteristics (the arrangement and dimensions of the objects that make up the maquette) form temporal semantics. The maquette therefore facilitates the development of compositional processes that consider time to be not only a variable, but also a structural element included in the computation. Temporal organization and computation of musical objects are linked in the same structure in this manner. This environment creates a privileged setting in constant development for different projects connected to composition or musical analysis, encompassing projects with the same fundamental temporal dimension (e.g. synthesis control, interactive scores, etc.).

The idea of integrating heterogeneous musical objects in one temporal structure and the necessity of maintaining a coherent graphical representation also led to research on the creation of a new type of document focused on the idea of a score in OpenMusic. This document - called a sheet - enables the integration of different types of musical objects that are perhaps linked to distinct temporal paradigms (e.g. beating, continual, hierarchical, etc.) in the same score. The cohabitation of "rhythmic" objects and objects that have been specified in "continual time" or of signals and symbolic objects in an editor that would ensure the exactness and coherence of their representation and their temporal alignment would be possible. Functional causal relations could also be established through visual programming tools.

Maquettes can be thought of as macroscopic organizations and sheets as an organization of the detail of heterogeneous and multi-scale temporal structures.

Recently, Antescofo, a specialized language for the general synchronization of complex musical processes, was proposed using the model of synchronous languages. One of the many applications is score following, and this research is now opening up to include the general problem of fine interactive control of temporal processes and will be the focus of collaborative projects with specialists in programming languages.

Participants