The Canon Score Language

Abstract

Canon is both a notation for musical scores and a programming language. Canon offers a combination of declarative style and a powerful abstraction capability which allows a very high-level notation for sequences of musical events and structures. Transformations are operators that can adjust common parameters such as loudness or duration. Transformations can be nested and time-varying, and their use avoids the problem of having large numbers of explicit parameters. Behavioral abstraction, the concept of making behavior an arbitrary function of the environment, is supported by Canon and extends the usefulness of transformations. A non-real-time implementation of Canon is based on Lisp and produces scores that control MIDI synthesizers. Introduction Canon is a computer language designed to help composers create note-level control information for hardware synthesizers or synthesis software. Canon was motivated by my need for a simple yet powerful language for teaching second-semester stud...

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