Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

So this is day 2 of the creative pact thing in which I try to work from home on my gf’s day off from work. Alas, I have no sketches to upload.
Paper graphic scores can either be single page or multi-page. Bogusław Schaeffer’s colour pieces, Anthony Braxton’s Falling River pieces and Carl Testa’s squiggles are all examples of single page pieces that work well. When I’ve done these pieces, performers have either taken the page as a whole, or picked different spots on the page to concentrate on. (I only saw very early versions of Testa’s pieces, so his instructions may have become more directed since then.) This interpretation has not required things be done in any particular order. Someone might start with a set of symbols or notation at the bottom right, then go on to the top left, then do something outline a large shape across the whole page.
Some good multipage scores are, obviously, Cardew’s Treatise and also Lektura by Schaeffer and Concerto by Lauren Redhead. Because these pieces progress regularly from one page to the next, a certain tendency towards chronological order is introduced. The pages therefore seem to need a structure that holds them together and allows them to progress. Schaeffer and Redhead use boxes. Their pieces are also divided into parts. So the performer can look at a box, know whether or not it belongs to them and know it’s timing relative to other boxes other people are interpreting. The box itself seems to be often taken as a whole, with performers able to decide on whatever ordering seems to make most sense in context. By contrast, Treatise is not in parts and the entire ensemble reads from the score, on the same page at the same time. His pages are held together by the ‘lifeline.’ This is a horizontal line across nearly every page that performers can orient themselves along. Mark Applebaum’s Medium is a multi-part piece that does not have a consistent structure, but even it has the vertical ordering of parts and many parts do have something lifeline-like. Some sort of line or box structure seems to be extremely helpful to performers of multi-page scores.
My piece will be on a single, changing screen, which I think makes it more like a multi-page piece than a single page piece. It will be a non-divided score like Treatise. My intention at the moment is to devise a gamut of symbols and then put those symbols in boxes, like Schaeffer or Redhead. Some of these symbols will be based on existing musical symbols, but in differing contexts. They may also be rotated within the bounding boxes, like Redhead.
Because this will be in javascript, I need a way to render them in a web browser. Rather than work out exactly how to draw a notehead in code (yikes), this situation seems to call for a font-based solution. I have not yet worked out what musical fonts I can count on to be available, but I have found the unicode specifications for musical symbols in fonts and how to represent those in HTML. Also, should you wish to type a unicode symbol on an ubuntu computer, you would first hit ctrl-shift-u and then type the hex code and then a space. So to type a bass clef, hit ctrl-shift-u 1D122 space. I have no idea what application this might have, but there you go.
What I’m imaging will happen is that the program will render an image using lines and curves and polygons, some musical font stuff and some text, then rotate that image some amount from 0-360 degrees, then clip it to a bounding box, then draw the clipped portion on the screen with a black outline around it.
I pondered putting a web server on the main, listening computer, in order to get it to render the images. It could then tell the clients to download and display them in the proper place, which would make sure everybody was doing the same thing. This might be the right idea, especially if I want to use one of LilyPond’s music fonts, which I spent too long trying to find on my system. Right now, though, it seems like an extra layer of work that hopefully I can avoid.
I’ve upgraded to the latest version of processing and downloaded the javascript and coffee script modes. The next step is to read the quick start guide for folks experienced with processing.

There’s some Creative Pact thing that people do for the month of September. I’ve decided that I should work on my commission for the Vocal Constructivists. I’m going to generate some graphics notation for them. When I say ‘generate,’ that’s pretty literal. My plan is to computer generate graphics notation in real time, in response to computer listening to what the choir is doing, so as to create a feedback loop of sorts.
Obviously, there are a lot of parts for this. I have some vague ideas of how to do the listening (SCMIR and some other feature extraction with SuperCollider). But as this is a feedback loop, there’s also a question of how people will tend to respond to various notation, so I’m starting with the notation aspect first.
There have been some very interesting live notation projects I’ve seen. They often use LilyPond as the rendering engine. There are some SuperCollider libraries that interface with this system. However, the Constructivists are more about graphic notation, so unless lilypond lets you disassemble notation symbols like Cardew’s Treatise, it’s not quite what I need. I really need a vector graphics library that I can communicate with via OSC.

Practising and Performing

The LilyPond stuff works really well because the notation is already very widely understood. There are a lot of ways a performer can interpret a crotchet on B-flat, but the pitch and duration are already set, at least, Other dynamics markings, phrase markings, etc give a lot of data to a performer. In essence, the perofrmer has thousands of hours spent already learning the notational symbols. Many or most of these elements may be absent or modified in graphical notation. Therefore, a performer of a graphical score must learn the notations they learn the piece. If the notation is changing in real time, this sets up a serious issue as to how they should practice.
There’s a chasing-one’s-tail problem with feedback loops, so for now some set process will generate the notation. Performers need to be able to see the notation while they practice and perform. This implies that either I’ll need to create some static printed sheets, which are in danger of beocming a fixed score, or else I need to be able to send notation to the laptops, tablets or other devices that they can then take home with them and look at.
I was considering using Open Frameworks or Cinder, but there are some issues that prevent this. These issues are political, not technical. And they have to do with Apple, who have deicded that free software is not welcome on their platforms. A tablet is exactly the form factor that’s needed, but as the real owner of all iPads is Apple computer, who sees fit to dictate what consumers can do with something they spend a small fortune on, I’m out of luck unless I want to write multiple versions in multiple languages and pay a fee to Apple for the privilege of wasting my time. So I’m going to have to do it in javascript.
If anybody is wondering why javascript is so popular right now, the answer is because Apple are wankers.
Right, ok, I hate javascript and I hate browser plaforms but sometimes art forces one to gaze down into muck so as to better appreciate the stars overhead. Anyway. So there’s a version of Processing for javascript, which I’m leaning towards because I’ve got some processing experience and there is a lot of documentation. Alas, somehow processing in the past has had the power to make even single rendered lines look ugly. But you know, sometimes you need to trade off things like aesthetics and performance and joy in life to make some Silicon Valley billionaires happy.
If I want to try something new, there are actually quite a few javascript vector graphics libraries on offer. One seemingly popular one is called Raphaë1 and then there is one with fun demos Bonsai and then one designed for ‘creative coding’ called Sketch.js, (which works with Coffee Script, which seems to be less painful than normal java script) and then there’s the very old school looking JSGL. I have no idea which one to use.
I’m hoping somebody gives me some suggestions, but barring that, Processing has a lot of documentation and a large user base. Also, since this is a piece for performers, I’d like it to have a longer self-life than I would expect out of a purely digital piece. If people are going to go to the trouble of learning it, they shouldn’t be forced to abandon it before they’re ready.
So my next task is to dig out my art supplies and start sketching out ideas. What might a snapshot of the notation look like? What are elements on the page and how might they transform?