Computer Applications in Music Composition and Research

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter describes activities in three areas of computing applications in music: music score input and output, sound generation and manipulation, and research on musical structure and performance. The chapter focuses on ways of representing music scores for computer storage, retrieval, and manipulation, and includes a discussion of two representative music codes, encoding devices and software, and music printing. The chapter discusses computer applications in music composition and includes information about the Musical Instrument Digital Interface(MIDI) standard, digital sound synthesis, and computer-aided composition. The chapter presents a survey of computer applications in music research and includes discussions of database developments, data structures for music analysis, adaptations of artificial intelligence techniques and concepts from cognitive science, and research into expressive musical performance. This chapter describes efforts arising from Algorithmic composition (Al) research whose goal is the composition of music in stylistic imitation of earlier composers. The most promising approaches are those using grammatical approaches and connectionist networks. In conclusion, the chapter presents comments on the current situation in each of these areas and then address briefly three philosophical issues attending the use of computers by musicians.