Conference Agenda

In digitally mediated music practices, musical reading unfolds within reconfigured notions of space and time. In sequencer environments, notation no longer exists as a linear, page-bound structure but as a navigable visual space: piano rolls, automation curves, and layered timelines spatialize musical temporality. Durations appear as graphic objects, dynamics as programmable trajectories, and articulation as editable data. Time becomes reversible, stretchable, and iterable. Musical meaning emerges not only through symbolic notation but through its execution within computational processes.

Digital reading therefore operates across multiple temporalities: symbolic time (the notated structure), computational time (processing and algorithmic mediation), and perceived musical time (listening). Each playback constitutes a new instantiation shaped by buffering, rendering, and programmed variability. The digital score is not simply reproduced—it is performed within computational space. At the center of this ecology stands the virtual instrument. Built from sampled performances and embedded aesthetic decisions, it carries traces of prior human interpretation while translating MIDI data into sound with machine precision. Yet its output is shaped by articulation engines, velocity layers, humanization algorithms, and increasingly by AI-supported systems capable of generating expressive timing and stylistic nuance beyond explicitly encoded parameters.

Positioned at the threshold between tool and collaborator, the virtual instrument occupies a liminal interpretive space in which interpretation is distributed across composer, interface, algorithm, and sound model. In this paper, I will examine how digital notation relocates interpretation into computational space and programmable time. Drawing on practical examples from film and game music production, I analyze the virtual instrument as an interpretive agent and argue that digital notation does not simply alter the medium of musical writing, but fundamentally reshapes how musical meaning is generated.

The systematic rule-based system for mensural notation proposed by Franco of Cologne in the last quarter of the thirteenth century (so-called ‘Franconian notation’) made a significant intervention in the history of music. Franco asserted that the notational symbol (the ‘figure’) ought to represent a fixed duration; he famously wrote that ‘a figure is a representation of a sound arranged in one of the modes. From this it follows that the figures ought to indicate the modes and not, as some have maintained, the contrary’. The predominant European notation systems of the following centuries (black and white mensural notations and common practice notation) adopted this crucial dictum thereafter. Franconian notation is in some ways context-based—that is, the duration is still somewhat based on the placement of notes relative to one another—but his system outlines a small number of logical rules for these instances that a computer can process relatively easily (for this, see Thomae 2017).

The online mensural notation editor (MPEditor, available at measuringpolyphony.org; PI: Desmond) enables the transcription of Franconian, black mensural and white mensural notations, allowing users to input medieval notational symbols and automatically translating their implied durations and polyphonic alignment of voices. However, a significant portion of western European medieval polyphony is notated in notations that preceded Franco’s rule-based system, which associated fixed durations to specific symbols, including, for example, Aquitanian and Notre Dame polyphony. BROKENSONG, a five-year project funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (PI: Desmond), examines polyphonic singing and literate cultures in late medieval Britain from c. 1150-c. 1350. As part of the BROKENSONG project, this corpus, extant in approximately 140 mostly fragmentary manuscript sources, will be digitally encoded. A large portion of this corpus is copied in notations that can be broadly categorized as either modal, pre-mensural, or mensural with Insular characteristics (Bent, Wibberley, Lefferts, Losseff). These notations are more flexible than standard Franconian notation. In this paper, I discuss the issues with digitally encoding these more flexible notations, and in particular focus on how medieval scribes, and twenty-first-century encoders conceptualize the alignment of voices in polyphony.

Musicologists once viewed print as the durable means through which we put our best ideas before colleagues and the wider musical public. These days almost anyone can create a digital archive to store and distribute the “flat” graphical symbols of standard musical notation (a PDF file will do). Indeed resources like IMSLP or the CPDL are already heavy with hundreds of thousands of both historical documents and home-grown editions. The authoritative Urtext and error-laden mess are offered up as interchangeable versions of the truth.

The same medium nevertheless also makes it possible for us to take responsibility for our decisions in newly transparent ways. Thanks to structured encodings known as XML (for “extensible markup languages”) one scholar can make a transcription of a text, but another can add variant readings, make annotations, or reconstruct missing parts without ever effacing the original work. These digital palimpsests are infinitely reusable but also indefinitely recoverable--a kind of acid-free paper of the computer age.

XML standards like MEI (modeled on its older sibling, the Text Encoding Initiative standard) can record a large vocabulary of nuanced elements traditionally associated with the scholarly critical edition: variants, emendations, reconstructions, and even information about who is responsible for them. Yet despite the flexibility of XML in digitally encoding textual and musical artefacts to support both online presentation in digital editions and musicological inquiry through computational analysis, it sits at the fringes of Data Science as it is taught today, with many students, even those with dual computational and musical interests, unaware of its significance let alone how to work with it effectively. No doubt our collective capacity with these kinds of tools will increase in the years to come, as we look increasingly at the need for sustainable, reusable, and interoperable texts in a resource-constrained context. In this presentation I will show some of the possibilities and challenges of this new way of representing musical texts (drawing on my recent experience with Renaissance repertories), in all their complexity, for classrooms and research alike.