The Decidability of Languages That Assert Music
Michael Kassler · Perspectives of New Music · 1976
The construction of formalized languages that assert music calls forth investigations of these languages' decidability. Having for such a language an effective procedure that determines given any musical compositioh whether it is or is not an assertion of the language is obviously desirable, for (amongst other reasons) the decision procedure produces automatically a derivational analysis, in accordance with the language, of any given assertable composition. In this note we show that any formalized language of the sort we have found useful for asserting music is decidable.' Such a language has the following two properties which are additional to those required of formalized languages in general. Because