Generating Music Notation in Real Time | Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.

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Generating Music Notation in Real Time

Dec 01, 2004 By Kevin C. Baird (/user/1001377) Like 2 people like this. Be the first of your
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Kevin Baird's No Clergy, his doctoral dissertation piece in

music composition, allows audience members to
influence the musical notation presented on-screen to
musicians in a live interactive performance.

Composers from a variety of backgrounds have

been interested in having greater freedom in
musical performances. This article describes
another attempt in this tradition.
(/issue/128)
In his Klavierstcke, Karlheinz Stockhausen allowed
performers to order prewritten material as they From Issue #128
saw fit. Earle Brown allowed conductors to mix and December 2004 (/issue/128)
match material in his Available Forms pieces, and
in his graphic scores, he allowed performers essentially to improvise whatever the
images in the score inspired them to play. Improvisation obviously is critical to jazz,
as well.

In all of these examples, the composer gives this increased freedom only to
performers or the conductor, not to the audience. My doctoral dissertation piece No
Clergy and its associated programs constitute one attempt to give similar freedoms
to the audience.

In No Clergy, performers play on-screen notation presented through a Web browser.

The audience has Web browsers open to pages with standard CGI forms, allowing
them to react to what they're hearing by entering data. The piece's scripts then
process the data, affecting the subsequent pages of notation presented to the
performers.

No Clergy has specific technical, logistical and esthetic requirements. The processing
must occur in real time. The audience's and performers' interfaces for the piece must
be familiar and comfortable. The piece must be transportableable to be performed
in any location with minimal setup requirements.

The user, who serves as the conductor and is either me or someone filling a similar
role in a performance where I am absent, starts the piece by running the bash script
setup.sh. The script generates, with Python, a markup file for GNU Lilypond, a music
typesetting program described in greater detail later in the article. It then processes
that Lilypond file into a PNG image, as shown in Listing 1. Portions of the script that
are not shown also perform cleanup actions to remove old data and ending actions to
place images in the appropriate Web directories.

Listing 1. Excerpts from setup.sh

python -O NoClergy/Python/make_ly.py \
clar > lilypond/ly/clar.ly
lilypond --png -o lilypond/out/ lilypond/ly/clar.ly

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Figure 1. Sample Initial Output for a Clarinet

Later, when user data are available, a similar bash script called noclergy.sh (Listing
2) reads the previous data and generates subsequent pages of notation. The script
mutate_config.py reads the user data and updates a config file, while mutate.py
applies those changes to the musical material, performing actions similar to the
setup.sh script described above, but this time with a previous example of output from
which to work.

Listing 2. Excerpts from noclergy.sh

python -O NoClergy/Python/mutate_config.py
python -O NoClergy/Python/mutate.py 'lilypond/ly/'

I chose an object-oriented paradigm because the musical material contains multiple

instances of similar types of data. Initially, the top-level Class was Score, defined as
one page of notation for one instrument. Each Score has a transposition level
appropriate for its instrument and can contain an arbitrary number of Measures. I
chose 20 as good number of Measures to fit comfortably on a single page with
reasonable legibility, and as a good duration of musical time between each updated
page of notation.

For Non-Musicians

Transposition

Transposition is a musical term for changing the pitch of a piece of music. Some
instruments sound lower or higher than normal and, therefore, require music written
for them to be transposed. This practice allows performers to learn fingerings for an
instrument family, rather than only one specific instrument.

Pitch Class

A note's pitch class is its pitch mod 12. Middle C is a pitch, whereas C is a pitch class.
When musicians talk about a C or a B flat, they are referring to pitch class. A
doubling of frequency is a rise of one octave, and differences in octave are what
separate notes with different pitches but the same pitch class.

Each Measure has a meter, which determines how long it is and its internal rhythmic
organization. It contains however many Notes fill that meter. The total number of
Notes also varies based on each Note's duration.

A Note is defined as an individual sound or silence event within a Measure. It has a

string called pitch, which is either r for a rest or an indication of its pitch class, such
as c, cs for C sharp, d or ef for E flat. It also has an integer called octave, which is
meaningful only for non-rests.

Notes also have durations, dynamics, which are variations in amplitude or volume,
and articulations, which determine whether the note is accented, detached or
sustained into the next note, among other things. Notes also can be tuplets, which are
a particular type of rhythmic organization.

Tuplets are notes or rests that occur at a different rate than their note type would
indicate. By far, the most common type of tuplet is the triplet. A set of three triplets

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occupy the same duration as two notes, so three 8th note triplets occur in the span of
two normal 8th notes, or one beat in most instances. Quintuplets are five notes in the
span of four, septuplets are seven in the span of four and so on. Unless otherwise
indicated, a set of tuplets squeezes x notes in the span of y, where y is the highest
power of 2 lower than x. Composers generally indicate deviations from this practice
with x:y notation on the tuplet set, so a 7:8 tuplet set stretches seven notes across the
span of eight.

No Clergy uses a non-unique list of tuplet typesthe number indicated by x in the

preceding paragraph. This allows me to weight in favor of triplets and quintuplets, as
is common. Anyone who wants to use my program to sound like Frank Zappa or
Brian Ferneyhough can alter the tuplet list as they wish, although musicians should
know that this initial version of the program does not yet support nested tuplets.
Non-musician programmers probably can discern from the name that nested tuplets
are sets of tuplets that themselves contain one or more sets of tuplets. The program
also does not yet support dotted notes, which use a notation convention to show that
a note should last half again as long.

When the scripts generate notation, they read a configuration file, updated by the
mutate_config.py script mentioned above. The various pc variables shown in Listing
3 represent the percentage chance that a given note will have the characteristic in
question, such as being a tuplet, being a rest as opposed to a note that sounds, having
an explicit dynamic mark and having an explicit articulatory mark.

______________________

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Simple it up not so long no (/article/7560#comment-347983)

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 10:30.

Simple it up not so long no one is going to read it all.

Continued work (/article/7560#comment-128239)

Submitted by Kevin C. Baird (http://kevinbaird.net/) (not verified) on Mon, 01/23/2006 - 18:37.

Ongoing work on this project is at

http://noclergy.rubyforge.org/ (http://noclergy.rubyforge.org/) .

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