Haskore music notation – An algebra of music –

Abstract

AbstractWe have developed a simple algebraic approach to music description and composition calledHaskore. In this framework, musical objects consist of primitive notions such as notes and rests, operations to transform musical objects such as transpose and tempo-scaling, and operations to combine musical objects to form more complex ones, such as concurrent and sequential composition. When these simple notions are embedded into a functional language such as Haskell, rather complex musical relationships can be expressed clearly and succinctly. Exploiting the algebraic properties of Haskore, we have further defined a notion ofliteral performance(devoid of articulation) through whichobservationally equivalentmusical objects can be determined. With this basis many useful properties can be proved, such as commutative, associative, and distributive properties of various operators. An algebra of music thus surfaces.