4. Scores and Timbre

So far, we have focused on the basics of musical sound: the periodic phenomena that characterize a single tone, and the synthesis techniques that produce it. But a tone in isolation is not yet music. Music unfolds in time as a sequence of events: notes that start, stop, and overlap to form melody, rhythm, and harmony.

In this chapter, we will focus on scores, and their relationship to other aspects of music. Music is often compared to language. Language exhibits a duality of acoustic and symbolic properties: acoustic speech is characterized by an underlying symbolic text representation. Analogously, underlying a music recording is a score: a high-level, sparse, and discrete description of the events that make up the music. We will study scores, how to represent them on a computer, and how to combine them with the other elements of musical sound we’ve studied previously.