Representing Musical Scores for Computer Analysis
Alexander R. Brinkman · Journal of Music Theory · 1986
Music theorists have had some degree of success in using the computer as an aid to forming or testing theories' and for doing utilitarian tasks such as identifying sets or manipulating matrices, but a lack of suitable software tools has been a major obstacle to musicians who wish to use the computer in score analysis. Typically each researcher has had to start almost from scratch, inventing or reinventing computational methods before any analysis could take place. Applications to actual analysis of musical scores have been ad hoc, and a few have been exported to other computer installations. The goal of the research presented here was to produce a data structure for representing scores within the computer (as opposed to an external coding language) that would be relatively easy to manipulate and that would be applicable to a broad spectrum of music-analytic activities? Some preliminary requirements for this system follow: