GUIDO Music Notation Jordan Smith MUMT January 2008

Overview GUIDO is a music notation language. 1. GUIDO’s goals 2. How GUIDO notates music 3. How GUIDO engraves music 4. GUIDO applications: –Gide –NoteServer –SALIERI –MIR 5. Pros and Cons of GUIDO

Guido d’Arezzo Credited with inventing music notation Image source:

1. Neumatic Notation Image source:

2. Conventional Music Notation Image source:

3. Modern Engraving Image source:

4. GUIDO Music Notation { [\title \tempo \staff \clef \key \meter \i d2/8 | \sl(\dim(d h1)) h \sl(\dim(h g)) g \sl(\cresc(f# a c2)) \sl(c h1) ], [ \staff \clef \key \meter _/8 | h1 _ _ g _ h0 \sl(c1 f# a) \sl(a g)] } Example source:

1. GUIDO’s goals Adequacy: –Simple musical concepts are simple to encode –Only more complex concepts are complicated to encode

Adequacy Renz 2002 p. 9, 18

1. GUIDO’s goals Adequacy: –Simple musical concepts are simple to encode Human readability

Music G 2 C 4 4 whole [ \clef \meter c/1 ] Source:

1. GUIDO’s goals Adequacy: –Simple musical concepts are simple to encode Human readability Perfect formatting Multifunctional

2. Notation Basic Notation Advanced Notation Extended Notation

2. Notation Basic notation [ Sequences ] { Segments } c do d&& bis1*1/4 \clef all together: [ \slur( f g {f/2, a2, c}) ]

2. Notation Advanced notation \slurBegin:1 … \slurEnd:1 \clef \glissando

2. Notation Extended notation Micro-tonal features Exact timing User-defined GUIDO tags and events

3. Engraving Translation between abstract representation (AR) and graphical representation (GR) GUIDO file > (parse) > AR > (physics) > GR

3. Engraving Renz 2002 p. 88

3. Engraving Renz 2002 p. 94

3. Engraving Renz 2002 p. 97

4. Applications: NoteServer (and NoteViewer) Quickly create passages of music for any purpose: pedagogy, WEB, etc.

4. Applications: Gide A syntax highlight editor for GUIDO files

4. Applications: SALIERI A structure-oriented environment for composition, manipulation, and analysis of music. (Think MATLAB.)

Hoos, Kilian et al. 1998

4. Applications: MIR abilities Step 1. Create database using PERL (GUIDO is text-based) Step 2. Pre-calculate transition probability matrices for absolute pitch and rhythm of each element in database Step 3. Hierarchically cluster pieces Step 4. Search!

5. Pros and Cons of GUIDO i.Incomplete, and inactive since 2003 –Extended notation and postscript output of NoteViewer are missing ii.Is being human-writable an asset? iii.Poor at representing the vertical and horizontal simultaneously i.Translates to and from major formats: XML, Finale, Sibelius. ii.Perhaps not for authoring, but it is certainly human-editable iii.…like every other computer- based format! Plus, it’s complete. …but…

Question period!

Bibliography Hoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel, Kai Renz, Jürgen Kilian The GUIDO Notation Format: A Novel Approach for Adequately Representing Score-Level Music. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: Hoos, Holger H., Jurgen Kilian, Kai Renz, Thomas Helbich SALIERI: A General, Interactive Computer Music System. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: Hoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel, Kai Renz Using Advanced GUIDO as a Notation Interchange Format. ICMC ’99 Proceedings: Hoos, Holger H., Kai Renz, Marko Görg GUIDO/MIR: an Experimental Musical Information Retrieval System based on GUIDO Music Notation. ISMIR ’01 Proceedings: Hoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel The GUIDO Music Notation Format Version 1.0. Specification Part 1: Basic GUIDO. (accessed 23 January 2008). Renz, Kai, Holger H. Hoos A WEB-based Approach to Music Notation using GUIDO. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: Renz, Kai Algorithms and Data Structures for a Music Notation System based on GUIDO Music Notation. PhD diss., Darmstadt University of Technology.