The search for the temporal grail? Reflections on notation, control and digital music representations.

The central question to be addressed before starting to design any music application is how to represent music internally. My paper revisits the basics and looks systematically and
thoroughly, albeit reflectively and philosophically, at music representation schemes outside the digital world: music notations in the pre-computer age. Following on from there, I ask how much of their functionality is actually supported at present. I see this as part of a search for the “holy grail in music technology”, the ultimate design for music data representation (if such a thing exists). Like all other grail-hunters, this academic simply cannot stop believing in its existence. To our critics, the followers of the “not-another-standard” camp, we grail-hunters tend to maintain that the journey is part of a process – a journey towards some sort of (musictechnological) enlightenment. My work has, therefore, involved looking at the methodologies used for designing systems and data structures. This paper is part of this work and looks specifically at issues around notation, control and the resulting requirements for digital representation.