New Paradigms: (1) The Musical Experience as a Visualizable Process

One paradigm that is encountered in various ways in the world of music software is that of music as an essentially architectural art. This architectural sense is being redefined, I believe, in our visually oriented electronic culture. The old sense of architecture, based on the completed work, is giving way to a clear sense of the process of achieving the design. One example comes from the work of Stephen Malinowski, who converts scores to dynamic images by creating a scrolling series of rectangular objects that are elongated to indicate relative durations and colored to delineate voice parts. Malinowski's scrolling scores are foreshadowed in Arthur Honegger's statement (I am a Composer, 1951) that music is geometry in time. In Malinowski's representation of the chorale prelude Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf, the theological message that spiritual perfection is a goal unattainable by will alone is shown visually as the tenor voice repeatedly 'falls down' on the screen. Malinowski's aim to make manifest principles of musical organization that are normally available only to competent readers of musical scores is modest. Yet the sweep of the effect is broad, since the animated image creates a third iteration of the theological message expressed in the text (the music being the second). In this way it facilitates comprehension in a way that would have been the envy of church composers of Bach's time.

The visualization of the musical process also has something to offer specialists. In the normal process of thinking about music, one listens to a piece, creates by aural or intellectual extrapolation an abstraction of some kind, and then tests the abstraction against other pieces by the same composer or in the same genre to determine the degree to which it is generalizable. With the Music Animation Machine, the abstraction is made by visual extrapolation. Since for most of us the serial memory of sound is much less reliable than the parallel memory of a visual image, details that might be discarded and relationships undetected in the first case are necessarily captured and preserved in the second.

New Paradigms: (2) The Musical Work as a Body of Information

Our own work at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities takes as its base an equally simple idea: that all music can be represented, albeit at times imperfectly, as processable data. The focus of our work for a number of years has been on the development of what we call, somewhat inaccurately, databases of musical information. The information amounts to untagged, non-relational, full-text electronic transcriptions of the standard repertory of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as represented in written sources.

Our data representation scheme, which has been designed and implemented by Walter B. Hewlett, is elaborated in such a way as to facilitate applications involving