OpenMusic

Through a series of creative projects this doctorate set out to research how computer-assisted composition (CAC) of music affects decision-making in my compositional practice. By reporting on the creative research journey, this doctorate is a contribution towards a better understanding of the implications of CAC by offering new insights into the composing process. It is also a contribution to the composition discipline as new techniques were devised, together with new applications of existing techniques.

Using OpenMusic as the sole programming environment, the manual/machine interface was explored through different balances between manual and algorithmic composition and through aesthetic reflection guiding the composing process. This helped clarify the purpose, adequacy and nature of each method as decisions were constantly being taken towards completing the artistic projects.

The most suitable use of algorithms was as an environment for developing, testing, refining and assessing compositional techniques and the music materials they generate: a kind of musical laboratory. As far as a technique can be described by a set of rules, algorithms can help formulate and refine it. Also capable of incorporating indeterminism, they can act as powerful devices in discovering unforeseen musical implications and results.

Algorithms alone were found to be insufficient to simulate human creative thought because aspects such as (but not limited to) imagination, judgement and personal bias could only, and hypothetically, be properly simulated by the most sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, important aspects of composition such as instrumentation, articulation and orchestration were not subjected to algorithmic treatment because, not being sufficiently integrated in OpenMusic currently, they would involve a great deal of knowledge to be specified and adapted to computer language. These shortcomings of algorithms, therefore, implied varying degrees of manual interventions to be carried out on raw materials coming out of their evaluations. A combination of manual and algorithmic composition was frequently employed so as to properly handle musical aspects such as cadence, discourse, monotony, mechanicalness, surprise, and layering, among others. The following commentary illustrates this varying dialogue between automation and intervention, placing it in the wider context of other explorations at automating aspects of musical composition.

This article introduces some new possibilities of audio manipula- tions and sound processing in the Computer-Aided Composition environment OpenMusic. Interfaces with underlying sound pro- cessing systems are described, with an emphasis on the use of the symbolic and visual programming environment for the design of sound computation processes.

This article addresses the problem of the representation and creation of sound by synthesis in the context of music composition, as seen from the computer-aided composition (CAC) perspective. An important theoretical basis of this work is the concept of computer modelling, discussed in relation to the notions of sound representation and music composition. Modelling sound as a signal is extended to the musical domain by considering as an alternative modelling composition as an activity that aims to produce sounds. The visual programming paradigm is adopted for the representation and conception of the composition models, and therefore for the musical representation of sounds. A composition framework dedicated to electro-acoustic music and sound synthesis integrated in the OpenMusic CAC environment is presented. Temporal issues are also discussed and are the object of specific developments.

This text analyzes aspects of the manipulation of the parameter of density in Disposições Texturais N. 3, composed by J. Orlando Alves, by means of the tools for musical analysis known as SOAL (Sonic Object Analysis Library). The main objective is to compare the results of this analysis with the compositional planning for density distribution.

This chapter examines computer assisted analysis and composition (CAAC) techniques
in relation to the composition of my piece TreeTorika for chamber orchestra. I describe
methods for analysing the musical features of a recording of a speech by Mao Zedong,
in order to extract compositional material such as global form, melody, harmony and
rhythm, and for developing rhythmic material. The first part focuses on large-scale
segmentation, melody transcription, quantification and quantization. Automatic tran-
scription of the voice was discarded in favour of an aural method using tools in Amadeus
and Max/MSP. The data were processed in OpenMusic to optimise the accuracy and
readability of the notation. The harmonic context was derived from the transcribed
melody and from AudioSculpt partial tracking and chord sequence analyses. The second
part of this chapter describes one aspect of computer assisted composition, that is the use
of the rhythm constraint library in OpenMusic to develop polyrhythmic textures. The
flexibility of these techniques allowed the computer to assist me in all but the final phases
of the work. In addition, attention is given to the artistic and political implications of
using recordings of such a disputed public figure as Mao.

OMPrisma is a library for the control of sound source spatialization and spatial sound synthesis in the computer-aided composition environment OpenMusic. In this article we describe the basic concepts underlying this library and its integration into compositional workflows ranging from high-level symbolic control structures to spatial sound synthesis and reproduction. A generic framework is presented, consisting of authoring environment, rendering engines and real-time decoding application. We particularly focus on periphonic spatialization processes and the usability of ambisonics from a compositional perspective.

OMPrisma is a library for the control of sound source spatialization and spatial sound synthesis in the computer-aided composition environment OpenMusic. In this article we describe the basic concepts underlying this library and its integration into compositional workflows ranging from high-level symbolic control structures to spatial sound synthesis and reproduction. A generic framework is presented, consisting of authoring environment, rendering engines and real-time decoding application. We particularly focus on periphonic spatialization processes and the usability of ambisonics from a compositional perspective.

Klama, for mixed choir, live electronics & prerecorded sounds, has its origins in the ritual lament of Southern Peloponnese (Greece); a “polyphony” composed of improvised monodies (moirolóya), epodes, crying, screams and monologues, accompanied by ritual gestures. By its acoustic violence the lament can be considered an alteration of vocality which affects simultaneously tonality, timbre and language. Klama has been developed in three levels, a nexus where vocal writing interacts with electroacoustics and live electronics, the latter seen as a metaphore of the inherent vocal alterations on the lament. In this paper we will show : 1) how the compositional material derived from the voice in oral and byzantine church tradition is explored for the choir and electronic writing; 2) how the three levels of Klama, acoustic, electroacoustic & live electronics interact through the act of composition and by means of the technological tools (Open Music, Max/Msp, Audio Sculpt).

The OM Composer's Book is a collection of essays about computer music composition written by composers. Each chapter provides the description of the musical work making use of "computer-aided composition" (CAC) tools, and more specifically of OpenMusic (OM), a visual programming environment for music composition developed by the Music Representations research group at IRCAM. Through the description of a personal compositional approach or a particular composition, the authors address a large diversity of problems related to symbolic computation techniques, data structures, discrete mathematics algorithms, and many other topics.

Preface by Miller Puckette. Texts by Michel Amoric, Marc Battier, Georges Bloch, Karim Haddad, Juan Camilo Hernández, Jean-Luc Hervé, Johannes Kretz, Serge Lemouton, Fabien Lévy, Paola Livorsi, Mikhaïl Malt, Paul Nauert, Ketty Nez, Gilbert Nouno, Hèctor Parra, Luis Antunes Pena, Orjan Sandred, Killian Sprotte, Elaine Thomazi-Freitas, Frédéric Voisin.

Nous présentons deux systèmes de contrôle du synthétiseur CHANT dans le cadre de l'environnement de composition assistée par ordinateur OpenMusic, tous deux développés et distribués récemment sous forme de bibliothèques spécialisées : Chant-lib et OM-Chant. Un des objectifs de cet article est de comparer les approches adoptées ou induites par ces deux bibliothèques. Pour cela nous détaillons leurs principes respectifs et analysons leurs particularités en termes d'implémentation et de contrôle.

Musical form and orchestration are closely related dimensions of the musical discourse. Despite the proposition of several practical tools for assisted-orchestration in the past few years, scarcely any computational methods for analyzing the role of orchestration in shaping musical form and its perception have been put forward. As an answer to that, in this presentation, we discuss a couple of Open-Music functions we designed for estimating the textural complexity of a piece's successive formal segments and sections. The calculations behind the functions originate in an appropriation of the mathematical theory of integer partitions and Wallace Berry's ideas on musical texture. In the current stage, our estimation of textural complexity is carried out upon the composer's prescriptions found on the musical score. Nevertheless, the work we present here is part of an overall model that ultimately aims to analyze form and orchestration combining symbolical and signal data, that is, joining the musical score and its performance recordings.

By multimodal interactions synthesis, we mean resynthesizing multimodal scenes via a corpus of heterogeneous data. This project is based on a framework developed in Max and Matlab which constitutes the digital composer's desk of Iquisme, a piece for soprano, nine instruments, an electroacoustic device and video. The corpus is made of material used in the first movement of Iquisme concert version. It is comprised of sounds, videos, 3D particle matrices and algorithmic control parameters indexed to the temporal progress of the piece. A dictionary learning of the corpus by Sparse Coding produces a lexicon of elementary interactions capable of reproducing parsimoniously any sequence of the first movement. Provided with this code, we then intend to reinject and deploy back into the progress of the piece a flow of data whose aim is to control the electroacoustic and video devices. A first experimentation enabled us to define a methodology for generating different dictionaries derived from the analysis of audio, video and audio coupled to the video. The whole corpus as well as a visualizing tool of the results applied to the temporal progress of the first six minutes of Iquisme first movement is available for download [1].

We present the new reactive programming framework in OpenMusic, highlighting some characteristics of the programming and computation paradigms involved. We describe the implementation of the hybrid demand-driven/event-driven evaluation model and show some preliminary extensions and applications.

... In this article, we present the view that computer-aided editing of music (in the form of digitalaudio) would greatly benefit from ... As the technology proliferates and production-oriented facilities become common, the need for efficient software tools for sound editing becomes more ...