Towards a Borgean Musical Space: An Experimental Interface for Exploring Musical Models

Overview & Synopsis

Musical compositions can be the object of advanced computational modelling. We develop this idea by creating formal models allowing the study of musical works from the repertoire and conceiving corresponding computational tools. From this perspective, one can aim to model, produce and evaluate different instances and configurations of such models. In this paper we discuss an experimental tool, as an attempt to visualise the space of instances that can be generated from a musical piece's model. This tool consists in an interface attached to a class in the OpenMusic environment, where parameter values are compared with the result of analytical descriptors, as that of 'cognitive-sonance' from the " Sonic Object Analysis Library " (SOAL). We demonstrate how this interface works by exploring it with a previously built model of James Tenney's piece, the Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow.