Musical Representation of Sound in Computer-Aided Composition: A Visual Programming Framework

Abstract

International audienceThis article addresses the problem of the representation and creation of sound by synthesis in the context of music composition, as seen from the computer-aided composition (CAC) perspective. An important theoretical basis of this work is the concept of computer modelling, discussed in relation to the notions of sound representation and music composition. Modelling sound as a signal is extended to the musical domain by considering as an alternative modelling composition as an activity that aims to produce sounds. The visual programming paradigm is adopted for the representation and conception of the composition models, and therefore for the musical representation of sounds. A composition framework dedicated to electro-acoustic music and sound synthesis integrated in the OpenMusic CAC environment is presented. Temporal issues are also discussed and are the object of specific developments

Interacting with Symbol, Sound, and Feature Spaces in Orchidée, a Computer-Aided Orchestration Environment

“…With several underlying conceptual distinctions, this approach principally corresponds to the programming and visual programming languages and environments such as Music-N/Csound (Mathews 1969), SuperCollider (McCartney 1996, and Max/MSP (Puckette 1991). Sound creation in these environments can be extended to a more musical level, because the sound is formalized as a part (or as the object) of a compositional process (Bresson and Agon 2007). However, this task is neither easy nor very intuitive and can easily lead composers to waste time and energy on building the target even before thinking about how to orchestrate it.…”

“…It also encouraged the emergence of music information retrieval, a field that aims to extract information from audio signals for the purposes of automatic classification and latent structure discovery. In the meantime, recent advances in the field of computer-aided composition introduced significant openings to integrate generation of electronic sound material into symbolic musical practices (Bresson and Agon 2007), making sound synthesis understandable as an interactive, modular, and formalized process.…”

Reduction as a transition controller for sound synthesis events

“…In the previous example however (Figure 3), the vibrato modulation applied to the fundamental frequencies would be shrunk (and therefore accelerated) or abruptly cut to fit in the new intervals, which is not an acceptable solution. 6 The main problem in this solution is actually that the synthesis parameters remain explicitly controlled only during the nonoverlapping intervals. An alternative solution could be to modify the duration of only one of the events, and to transform the values in the other one so as to implement a particular transition process.…”

“…Computeraided composition is concerned with the formal development of abstract and complex compositional models embedding programs, data structures, notation and graphical representation in the conception of generative or transformational processes. This approach further emphasizes a high-level functional orientation in the specification and processing of harmonic material, of time structures, and more recently for the control of sound processing and spatialization [6].…”

OpenMusic

“…The latest developments in OpenMusic particularly aimed to extend the scope of its applications toward signal processing, for instance with a number of new libraries and tools dedicated to sound analysis, synthesis, and to the manipulation of audio and other low-level description data using the symbolic visual programming framework [16,13,18]. Spatial sound and the conception of new ways to represent and generate sound in space and/or using spatial rendering technologies is another currently active area of research and development in the environment [32,20].…”