From analysis to surface:Generating the surface of Milton Babbitt's Sheer Pluck from a parsimonious encoding of an analysis of its pitch-class structure

In recent years, a significant body of research has focused on developing algorithms for computing analyses of mu- sical works automatically from encodings of these works' surfaces [3,4,7,10,11]. The quality of the output of such analysis algorithms is typically evaluated by comparing it with a “ground truth” analysis of the same music pro- duced by a human expert (see, in particular, [5]).In this paper, we explore the problem of generating an encoding of the musical surface of a work automatically from a systematic encoding of an analysis. The ability to do this depends on one having an effective (i.e., comput- able), correct and complete description of some aspect of the structure of the music. Generating the surface struc- ture of a piece from an analysis in this manner serves as a proof of the analysis' correctness, effectiveness and com- pleteness.We present a reductive analysis of Sheer Pluck (1984), a twelve-tone composition for guitar by Milton Babbitt (1916–2011). This analysis focuses on the all-partition array structure on which the piece is based. Having pre- sented this analysis, we formalize some constraints on the structure of the piece and explore some computational difficulties in automating the generation of the all- partition array structure