Formalisms and Interfaces to Manipulate Music Information: The Case of Music Petri Nets

Music Petri nets are a mathematical formalism that has been already adopted in the context of music information analysis and manipulation, concerning both symbolic scores and audio content. Among the main advantages, it is worth mentioning their possibility to clearly describe music processes and transformations inside a music composition, their easy-to-understand graphical representation, and the availability of formal tools to analyze the nets thus obtained. But previous research has also highlighted some limits in the usability of music Petri nets, due to an interface far from the ones composers and performers are used to, such as digital score editors and digital audio workstations. In this paper, we propose a solution that combines the descriptive power of such a mathematical formalism with the ease of use of editing tools to which musicians are accustomed. The idea is to design human-computer interfaces that, standing between the musician and the mathematical formalism, can hide the details of the underlying Petri nets