Stenographic Patterns for Speed Music Notation Antonio Fernando da Cunha Penteado Music Department, Arts Institute (IA) University of Campinas (UNICAMP) [email protected] José Fornari Interdisciplinary Nucleus for Sound Communication (NICS) University of Campinas (UNICAMP) [email protected] Abstract: Its common that musicians consider faster to handwrite music notation rather than doing the same task through the use of a computer music editing tools (e.g. Finale, Sibelius, Musescore). The major reasons for this seems to be: 1) the fact that main input computer interface (i.e. keyboard) was developed for textual symbols and so it limits the speed of musical symbols insertion even with the aid of a mouse. 2) the lack of an unified method of musical data insertion and/or edition for all music editing tools and specially a method that explores recurring musical patterns. This work presents the basis for a new method of music notation data entry that explores the identification and retrieval of perceptually recurring musical patterns, that can be represented by stenographic textual symbols. This way the musician can quickly notate a music score by the identification and attribution of stenographic patterns. This work aims to establish the basis for a unified stenographic pattern model for speed music notation that will be faster to write and cognitively easier to learn than handwritten musical notation. Key-words: Musical Patterns, Stenography, Music Notation Título: Padrões Estenográficos para Notação Musical Rápida Resumo: É comum que músicos considerem ser mais rápido escrever partituras à mão ao invés de usarem de uma ferramenta computacional para notação (e.g. Finale, Sibelius, Musescore). Os maiores motivos parecem ser: 1) o fato de que a interface de inserção de dados do computador (i.e. o teclado) foi desenvolvida para inserção de caracteres textuais, o que limita a velocidade de inserção de símbolos musicais mesmo com o auxílio do mouse. 2) a falta de um método único de inserção e/ou edição de dados musicais para todas as ferramentas (softwares e suas versões) e especialmente que explore a presença de padrões musicais recorrentes. Este trabalho apresenta a base para um novo método de entrada de dados para notação musical que explora a identificação e a aquisição de padrões musicais recorrentes que podem ser representados por símbolos estenográficos textuais. Desta maneira um musicista pode rapidamente criar uma partitura musical a partir da identificação e atribuição de padrões estenográficos. Este trabalho visa a estabelecer as bases para um modelo de escrita de padrões estenográficos que possibilite que a escrita musical através de computadores seja mais rápida e cognitivamente mais fácil de aprender que a notação musical manuscrita. Palavras-chave: Padrões Musicas, Estenografia, Notação Musical 1. Introduction Music notation in a computer environment became a necessity to all musicians, either to the composer, the arranger or the teacher. This one has many benefits like allowing corrections without blot, printing with high quality and speed, instant separation of parts in a grand staff, transposition, replication and distribution, automatic digitalization without the use of a scanner, sound generation, etc. Computers are known to be data processors, where input data is processed to return output data. While those benefits are evident regarding the quality and speed of the output data production, the usual computing gestural data input devices (keyboard and mouse) slow down the entry of music notation data, when compared with the traditional handwriting method. According to Igoa (2010) “Music and language are closely linked from its roots. They are ways of communication, expression, apprehension and existence. Music is a vehicle to know the world, and human beings have always sung their languages throughout times. Without any doubt, experiencing music and language allows us to connect to our surrounding, evoke emotions and even find a reflection of what we are or what we are living in what we listen to”. Although it still debatable whether or not music can activate neural pathways related to language, Koelsch (2004) compared the processing of semantic meaning in language and music, indicating that both can retrieve the meaning of a word, and that music can, as language, determine physiological indices of semantic processing. However, whereas writing language (text) requires a somewhat small and well delimited alphabet (at least for writing western languages), writing music requires the use of a larger and more complex set of symbols that are unable to fit in a regular computer keyboard (as it is for text) in spite of using the mouse to enhance the possibilities, it is still a hardship for the user to correctly retrieve and handle such amount of music notation symbols in a computer. Natural language (and its textual notation) inspired the development of machine (as the computer) programming languages. Programming and textual language share several features in common, such as organization of semantic meaning and syntactic structure. According to Sanford (2014) one of the first programming languages occurred before the computing era. It is regard to the punch holes on a player piano scroll. Although not designed to human- machine interaction (as the computer programming languages), it can in fact be seen as a limited domain-specific programming language. Computer software tools imposed a new paradigm to the process of symbolic music data input, and each one of major companies that produces music editing softwares (such as: Finale, Sibelius, Encore) has its own solution and so there is a lack of a unified system for music notation among those softwares and their versions, imposing a steep learning curve, even on how to create a simple musical lead sheet. It seems that the only feature they have in common is the use of a GUI (graphical user interface). Some alternative groups, generally those related to free softwares, venture to another approaches of musical data inputing. Instead of dealing with adapting input interfaces to write music, they paved the way to represent music by using textual language. Some initiatives in this field are: MuTex, MusicTex, MusixTex, Lilypond, ABC notation, GUIDO music notation, VexTab, etc. If music and language share some common background, as pointed above, by Igoa (2010) and Koelsch (2004), it might be useful to develop a method of music notation in a similar manner as languages are represented by textual structures. Here it is presented the first attempt to implement this concept, by creating the a simple musical textual language and a computer model able to analyze (parse) it. For that, a context-free grammar (with just a few production rules) was used to convert textual segments (words) into musical patterns. Thus, the role of this parser is to convert this textual language into a file format that other softwares tools can import (Viz. MusicXML format) and afterwards converting it to audio or printed scores (PDF style or image). The aim of this work is to create a novel computer model for speed music notation that may not only be faster, but also more intuitive for the user, as it explores the cognitive correspondence between language and music. Some of the foreseen advantages of a textual method of music writing are covered in section 4, as the most important one seems to be the possibility of using stenographic strategies to accelerate music data entry by a shorthand model that represents recurrent musical patterns by unique symbols. This is a task that, as far as we know, no other software tool uses or take into account. 2. Stenographic Patterns Stenography (Greek: stenos, tight or narrow, and graphein, write) is an abbreviated writing technique by conventional signs for fast transcription of speech (Larousse, 1999). The first organized system of stenography dates back to the first century B.C., It is known as "Tironian Notes" (Cury, 1994). Currently in Brazil stenography is used to document legislative sessions through real-time transcripts, and it is a very fast and reliable registration system of human speech. According to Cramer (2006), music and stenography both involve the writing of sounds and modern stenographic systems puts phonemes speech on scales that vaguely resemble to musical scales. The contemporary English stenography, developed in the XIX century by Henry Sweet is divided in two types; orthographic (slower to write but faster to learn) and phonetic (slower to learn but faster to write). Similar to the phonetic stenography, that represent phoneme patterns (sounds) with symbols, the core of the work here presented is to identify recurring musical patterns and represent them using plain text symbols (ASC-II characters), so it can be represented as a textual writing language, which seems to be the easiest way to input data through the computer keyboard. Considering that a reasonable number of musical patterns are retrieved and easily accessed by intuitive and fast-to-type symbols, this system will probably be the first computer model of stenographic music notation; a reliable and faster musical data input method using, as gestural interface, only a regular computer keyboard. 3. Musical Patterns The use of a pattern language as a tool to solve design problems was initially proposed by Alexander (1977), in his seminal book "A Pattern Language". According to Alexander (which was an architect), each pattern detected by our cognition expresses a recurring problem of its environment and therefore points out the possible arrangements that may solve the presented problem. His studies went beyond the scope of architecture to be adapted to many areas of knowledge, including computer science, as in (Duell, 1997). In music, this pattern language can also be applied and we present bellow a practical example of it. There are three major types of patterns in music: harmonics, melodics and rhythmics. The main goal is to detect those patterns and associate them with easy to remember stenographic textual names.