Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!salt.acc.com!ucsd!telesoft!dar
From: dar@telesoft.com (David Reisner)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: A Philosophical question about music.
Summary: parallel ties
Message-ID: <686@telesoft.com>
Date: 7 Feb 90 10:17:29 GMT
References: <1990Feb1.074731.19127@intacc.uucp>
Organization: David Reisner, Consulting
Lines: 34


In your article, you suggest representing monophonic/serial music as a
series of musical events of various durations - some sounds/notes, some
silence.  You further observe that music is actually made up of many,
potentially simultaneous events, and ask how that should be represented.

I agree that a simple serial sequence is an appealing representation in
many cases, however I don't think a sequence should start at the beginning
of a piece and end at the end.  The sequences are the fragments from which
music is contructed (from arpeggio, to phrase, to part/section).

Some sets of parallel events might be reasonably considered as several
simple sequences tied together in time; others float free of each other;
and some are tied together by some characteristic (e.g. tempo), but not by
specific times.

This could reasonably be represented as (attributed) connections between
simple sequences.  A given connection would provide a tie between some
characteristics.  A time attribute would specify that all the points in
all the sequences to which this connection exists must occur at the same
time.  A tempo attribute would make the connected sequences have the same
tempo.  Volume, inflection, rhythmic structure, motif could all be
possible attributes.  (This implies that the sequences might also contain
only some of these attributes, so you could have (traditional) pitch
sequences, rhythm sequences, timbre sequences.  These separations allow
some interesting musics to be described.)

(I'm not sure how to allow multiple connections with the same attribute
to a single sequence (a slow tempo connection near the beginning and a
fast one near the end, with the tempo characteristic of the sequence
"stretching" between the two points.)

-David
{uunet,ucsd}!telesoft!dar, dar@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu