Notation as visual representation of sound-based music

Abstract

This text describes the musical evaluation of a hybrid music notation system that combines traditional notation with symbols and concepts from spectromorphological analysis. During three academic years from 2017 to 2020, three groups of composition students learned to work with sound notation, recreating and interpreting short electroacoustic music sketches based solely on their notation transcriptions–they had not heard the original sketches. The students’ score interpretations bore obvious similarities to the original music sketches and their written reflections showed that there were no major difficulties in understanding the notation although some difficulties existed concerning finding suitable sounds, especially sounds with stable pitch.