Issues on the representation of time and structure in music

Abstract

This article discusses the issues in the design of a representational system for music. Following decisions as to i~he primitives of such a system, their time structure and general structuring is discussed. Most of the issues are presented as controversies, using extremes to clarify the underlying problems. Associating time intervals and their constraints with the components of musical structure turns out to be essential. These constraints on time intervals model an important characteristic of musical knowledge and should be part of the representation, i.e. part of the syntax. It is concluded that a representation of music should, in the short run, be made as declarative, explicit and formal as possible, while actively awaiting representation languages that can deal with the presented issues in a more flexible way.

Temporal semantics for a live coding language

“…Human interaction with systems that employ temporal reasoning can be considered either from a software engineering perspective (the usability of formal time notations, for example as in Kutar et al [KBN01]), or from a cognitive science standpoint, as in Honing's discussion of music cognition from a representational perspective [Hon93]. This is particularly relevant to Sonic Pi, where we are trying to invent a novel representation for music.…”

“…As described by Honing [Hon93] (see Section 7), music systems may represent temporal structure either explicitly (describing time intervals and relations) or implicitly (in an ordered sequence of notes having different durations). Musical scores provide an implicit time representation, while most music programming systems rely on explicit time representation.…”

Acoustic Cues to Beat Induction: A Machine Learning Perspective

“…However, "there seems to be a general consensus on the notion of discrete elements (e.g., notes, sound events, or objects) as the primitives of music but a detailed discussion and argument for this assumption is missing from the literature" (Honing, 1993). Scheirer (1998) also argues that the modeling of human perception of music should not be based on abstract symbols such as durations, pitches, or chords.…”

Plans as structured networks of hierarchically and temporally related case pieces

“…As studied by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), Balaban (1992) and Honning (1993), music is a domain in which "structure", "hierarchy" and "time" are more than occasional keywords. Music is indeed a highly structured and organised world.…”