From Trevor and Víctor — Abjad v1.1.1 documentation

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# From Trevor and Víctor

We are composers Trevor Bača and Víctor Adán, creators of Abjad, and our earliest collaborative work dates back to shared undergraduate years in Austin. It was the mid- to late-90s and we found ourselves interested in ways of building up ever larger sets of musical materials in our scores, with ever greater amounts of musical information.

Our work then began with pitch formalization, creating materials in C and then writing the results as MIDI to hear what we’d created. Turns out that this is a fairly common gateway into materials generation for many composers, and so it was for us. Probably this was, and is, due to the ever present availability of MIDI and, to a lesser extent, CSound. But even back then it was clear to us to finding ways to embody other aspects of the musical score – from nested rhythms to the different approaches to the musical measure to the arbitrarily complex structures possible with overlapping musical voices – would require a wholly different level of consideration, and different development techniques as well.

As an example, consider flat lists of floating-point values. This basic data structure, together with the constant need some type of quantification or rounding, feeds much of most composers’ work with CSound, pd and the like. It is a good thing, therefore, that essentially all modern programming languages include tools for manipulating flat lists of floats out of the box, or in the standard library. But what happens when you want to think of pitch as something much more than integers for core values with, perhaps, floats for microtones? What if you want to work with pitches as fully-fledged objects? Objects capable of carrying arbitrarily large sets of attributes and values? Objects that might group together, first into sets, and then into larger assemblages, and then into still larger complexes of pitch information loaded, or even overloaded, with cross-relationships or textural implications? Carrying this surplus of information about pitch, or the potential uses of pitch, in data structures limited to, or centered around, the list-of-floats paradigm then becomes a burden.

And what of working with rhythms not only as offset values, as implied by the list-of-floats approach, but as arbitrarily nested, stretched, compressed and stacked sets of values, as allowed by the tupleting and measure structures of conventional score? A different approach is needed.

There was, and still is, no reason to believe that general purpose programming languages and development tools should come readily supplied with the objects and methods most suitable for composerly applications. And this means that the attributes of a domain-specific language that will best meet the needs of composes interested in working formally with the full complement of capabilities in traditional score remains an open question.

We continued our work in score formalization independenly until 2005, Trevor in a system that would come to be called Lascaux, and Víctor in a system dubbed Cuepatlahto. We experimented with C, Mathematica and Matlab as the core programming languages driving our systems before settling independently on Python, Víctor out of experiece at MIT, where he was working on his masters at the Media Lab with Berry Vercoe, and Trevor out of the working necessities of a professional developer and engineer.

We passed through indepedent experiences using Finale, Sibelius, Leland Smith’s SCORE, and even Adobe Illustrator as the notational rendering engines for Lascaux and Cuepatlahto. Through all of this, both systems were designed to tackle a shared set of problems. These included:

1. The difficulty involved in transcribing larger scale and highly parameterized gestures and textures into traditional Western notation.
2. The general inflexbility of closed, commercial music notation software packages.
3. The relative inability of objects on the printed page in conventional score to point to each other — or, indeed, to other objects or ideas outside the printed page — in ways rich enough to help capture, model and develop long-range, nonlocal relationships throughout our scores.

Afer collaborating on a joint paper describing the two systems, and after discussing collaborative design and implementation at length, both online and in weekends’ long review of our respective codebases, we decided to combine our efforts into a single, unified project. That project is now Abjad.

In our work on Abjad we strive to develop a powerful and flexible symbolic system. We picked the phrase ‘formalized score control’, or FSC, as a nod to Xenakis, who was so far ahead in so many ways, and also to highlight our primary project goal: to bring the full power of modern programming languages, and tools in mathematics, text processing, pattern recognition, and modular, iterative and incremental development to bear on all parts of the compositional process.

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