Rationalizing Musical Time: Syntactic and Symbolic-Numeric Approaches

This paper deals with various problems in quantifying musical time encountered both in the analysis of traditional drumming and in computer-generated musical pieces based on "sound-objects", hereby meaning code sequences controlling a real-time sound processor.<BR /><BR />In section 1 it is suggested that syntactic approaches may be closer to the intuitions of musicians and musicologists than commonly advocated numeric approaches. Further, symbolic-numeric approaches lead to efficient and elegant solutions of constraint-satisfaction problems relative to symbolic and physical durations, as illustrated in sections 2 and 3 respectively