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Visualizing Sound: Digital Music Representations

Landon Morrison, Author
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O'Callaghan on conventional music notation

James discusses the commonly held notion in classical music culture that the notated score is the ideal representation of the musical work, and then compares this view to other art forms:


JO: I think we have the historical analog of the score of being the piece, of being the music, of being a perfect representation of the ideal of the music, and any performance of it is sort of a flawed interpretation of that platonic relic. But in other disciplines we don’t necessarily have that—dance still doesn’t have a universally accepted way of saying this is the piece. It kind of lives and dies with the performance. A lot of performance art and visual art background really accepts the ephemerality of its existence, and I think in music we have this sort of anxiety of permanence. And I’m not saying that I don’t feel it—definitely a big motivation in going into artistic creation of any kind is to try to imprint something, and to affect something into the world. So if it lives and dies with that performance there is a kind of a tension there, but that’s something that these tools open up and I think it’s a good opportunity to reflect on those things.
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