Extending music notation as a programming language for interactive music

Abstract

This work describes a novel approach for composing and performing interactive music by extending the traditional staff notation to the programming language domain. The proposed syntax aims to describe the interaction between humans and computers in live-electronics music performance. Thus, both performers and machines will understand this new notation, creating a cohesive music representation for performance that is both human-readable and technology-independent. This paper starts by describing some critical issues related to live-electronics that make it challenging to build repertoire around this genre. Next, the proposed approach is detailed, along with some syntax examples. Finally, the last section describes the evaluation of the proposed approach, including a description of the software implementation and a set of short interactive-pieces.