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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Stan Tempelaars (ed.): Signal Processing, Speech, and Music (1996)

This text offers a comprehensive introduction to the theory of signals and systems and the way in which this theory is applied to the study of acoustic communication (both digital and analogue): the development of systems for producing, transmitting and processing speech and music signals. The book is designed to make the reader acquainted with the refined and powerful theoretical and practical tools available for this purpose. The book teaches understanding of such concepts as amplitude and phase spectrum, impulse and frequency response, amplitude and frequency modulation, as well as such methods for the analysis and synthesis of speech and musical systems like LPC and wave shaping. The use of complex numbers is avoided and a knowledge of mathematics beyond that of secondary school level is not necessary.

Publisher Swets & Zeitlinger, 1996
Volume 1 of Studies on new music research
ISBN 9026514816, 9789026514814
334 pages

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The Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge (ADILKNO): The Media Archive. World Edition (1992/1998)

Dense, rigorous essays concerned not with the secret intentions lurking behind information transmission, but on the parallel worlds created through these transmissions. Media see the world as raw material for their own project, and as they are forced to constant development, the media text can never produce a final understanding. In these essays, ADILKNO looks for models of thought and magic words that will help the media text spell itself out to the point of exhaustion.

Many pieces in the “Media Archive” were originally written for the Dutch media art magazine “Mediamatic” and the Belgian film magazine “Andere Sinema” (Other Cinema).

Originally published as: Stichting ter Bevordering van de Illegale Wetenschap. “BILWET Media-Archief.” Amsterdam: Ravijn, 1992 and Agentur Bilwet “Medien-Archiv”, Mannheim: Bollmann, 1993.
Translated from the Dutch by Laura Martz, Washington, D.C., and Sakhra -l’Assal/Ziekend Zoeltjes Produkties, Amsterdam, 1997
Published by Autonomedia, New York City, 1998
ISBN: 1570270791
Anti-Copyright © 1997 Autonomedia & Adilkno

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