The Future is Graphic: Animated notation for contemporary practice

Abstract

A growing number of musicians are recognising the importance of re-thinking notation and its capacity to support contemporary practice. New music is increasingly more collaborative and polystylistic, engaging a greater range of sounds from both acoustic and electronic instruments. Contemporary compositional approaches combine composition, improvisation, found sounds, production and multimedia elements, but common practice music notation has not evolved to reflect these developments. While traditional notations remain the most effective way to communicate information about tempered harmony and the subdivision of metre for acoustic instruments, graphic and animated notations may provide an opportunity for the representation and communication of electronic music. If there is a future for notating electronic music, the micro-tonality, interactivity, non-linear structures, improvisation, aleatoricism and lack of conventional rhythmic structures that are features of it will not be facilitated by common practice notation. This article proposes that graphic and animated notations do have this capacity to serve electronic music, and music that combines electronic and acoustic instruments, as they enable increased input from performers from any musical style, reflect the collaborative practices that are a signpost of current music practice. This article examines some of the ways digitally rendered graphic and animated notations can represent contemporary electronic music-making and foster collaboration between musicians and composers of different musical genres, integrating electronic and acoustic practices.

Acid Patterns: How people are sharing a visual notation system for the Roland TB-303 to create and recreate acid house music

“…This modulation notation would demonstrate the changes in sound and timbre over time while the pitch remains the same, thus allowing for communication of both sound-based and note-based information. The modulation mapping would be visually consistent with spectrographic notational approaches (Vickery 2014(Vickery , 2018, animated notation (Vickery 2014;Hope 2020) and automation lanes used in digital audio workstations (DAW) software.…”

“…Research in music notation has called for open formats that acknowledge the contributions of the performer and the composer (Hope 2020). Other studies have explored the multiple relationships between sound and visual communication, how they impact, influence and contribute to each other (Sloboda 1976;Martin 2014;Enström, Dennis, Lynch and Schlei 2015;Weekes 2016).…”

“…Cage documented over two hundred different examples from various composers (Cage 1969). Developments in screen-based notation systems have allowed for animated, scrolling notation (Fischer 2015;Vickery, Devenish, James and Hope 2017;Hope 2020). Technological developments have also seen the score and the instrument combine as tangible scores (Tomás and Kaltenbrunner 2014;Tomás 2016).…”

The Kaon’CPT Collective: Building a musical culture of not-in-real-life performance through conducted live comprovisation

“…Reading music is a developed skill and some musicians can sight-read extremely well, but there are limits to what a performer can interpret without prior knowledge (Eigenfeldt 2014). It is not uncommon that composers decide what elements they wish to specify precisely, how much fidelity is required and how much potential is desirable (Hope 2020). In this case, we opted for pitch notation to be interpreted either as literal pitch (in its register) or associated with an arbitrary sound event.…”