Notating Action-Based Music

The author discusses the notation of action-based music, in which physical gestures and their characteristics, such as shape, direction and speed (as opposed to psychoacoustic properties such as pitch, timbre and rhythm), play the dominant role in preserving and transferring information. Grounded in ecological perception and enactive cognition, the article shows how such an approach mediates a direct relationship between composition and performance, details some action-based music notation principles and offers practical examples. A discussion of tablature, graphic scores and text scores contextualizes the method historically.