Stephen Travis Pope: Software Models and Frameworks for Sound Composition, Synthesis, and Analysis: The Siren, CSL, and MAK Music Languages (2005/2007)

Music is an undeniably complex phenomenon, so the design of abstract representations, formal models, and description languages for music-related data can be expected to be a rich domain. Music-making consists of a variety of diverse activities, and each of these presents different requirements for developers of new abstract and concrete data formats for musician users.

The topic of this anthology is the design of formal models and languages for a set of common musical activities including (but not limited to) composition, performance and production, and semantic analysis. The background of this work is the 50-year history of computer music programming languages, which began with low-level and (by today’s standards) simplistic notations for signal synthesis routines and compositional algorithms. Over these 50 years, many generations of new ideas have been applied to programming language design, and the topics of formal modeling and explicit knowledge representation have arisen and taken an important place in computer science, and thus in computer music.

The three concrete systems presented here have been developed and refined over a period of 25 years, and address the areas of (a) music composition (Siren), (b) sound synthesis and processing (CSL), and (c) music data analysis for information retrieval (MAK). In each successive generation of refinement of these concrete languages, the underlying models and metamodels have been considered and incrementally merged, so that the current-generation (Siren 7, CSL 4 and MAK 4) share both superficial and deep models and expressive facilities. This allows the user (assumed to be a composer, performer, or musicologist) to share data and functionality across these domains, and, as will be demonstrated, to extend the models and frameworks into new areas with relative ease.

The significant contributions of this work to the literature can be found in (a) the set of design criteria and trade-offs developed for music language developers, (b) the new object-oriented design patterns for computer music systems, and (c) the trans-disciplinary design of the three specific languages for composers, performer/producers, and musicologists presented here.

Anthology of papers by Stephen Travis Pope – 1986-2005; updated 2007
451 pages

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