How to write an electronic music score

More and more electroacoustic music is being created for live performance. Unlike most Western music, these works use sound effects and a wide variety of tones. They can sound like running water, the roar of an animal or something unidentifiable.

Here's the problem: how can these sounds be represented in sheet music, so they can be performed? What musical notation system would work?

In the West, music has traditionally been represented by 12 notes written on staffs. Could this conventional system be used for electronic music or must a new one be invented? And how could any system of notation for electronic music be made readily understandable?

This summer, Nicolas Bernier, a professor of digital music in the Faculty of Music at Université de Montréal, is considering these questions and working on a new notation system with the help of Ph.D. students David Caulet and Pierre-Luc Lecours.

Writing sheet music for a multi-tonal instrument is another major challenge. The piano and violin have relatively stable timbres. A piano will generally sound like a piano and a violin like a violin. But electroacoustic instruments produce a multitude of timbres. They can sound like a piano or a violin or something else entirely.

So how best to describe these multi-timbral sounds, and how can the notation be made easily readable and quickly usable by as many people as possible? Ideally, musicians should be able to understand intuitively what the sheet music is saying. Bernier plans to explore different approaches to rendering the notation graphically.

Just as a play will have stage directions at the beginning of a scene, an electroacoustic score could indicate instrument settings at the beginning of the piece and whenever there’s a change. For example, turning the violin bow backward will produce a harsher, less melodic sound. “In the score," said Bernier, "you might write something like ‘play with the bow backward for a shrill or scratchy timbre’."

As a first step, scoring a synthesizer piece he's working on, Bernier is using conventional Western notation supplemented by instructions for timbre and manipulations. He also plans to work on a text-based notation system.

To help him in his research on electroacoustic sheet music, Caulet will work on notation for unconventional uses of guitar effects pedals. He is preparing a performance and his research focuses on new ways of playing and notating this style of music, for which there is currently no standard method.

“Although guitar pedals are commonly used, there are few precise codes for indicating the manipulations in real time,” said Bernier. “Usually, people just say whether distortion is on or off. However, guitar pedals can be used to modify sound parameters in a variety of ways live, and there is no notation system for describing this precisely.”

For his part, Lecours will look at performances and compositions for modular synthesizers. Few musicians perform works for modular synthesizers written by others due to their complexity and the difficulty of communicating them. Performances are often based on technical outlines and a good dose of improvisation rather than formal scores. Lecours’ research will also explore approaches to notation.