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Geometric Image Modelling of the Musical Object
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 21, Supplement 1988
- pp. 69-72
- Article
- Additional Information
Contemporary music is often thought of in terms of musical objects where tonic notes, appropriately clustered, give a mass corresponding to height and tessitura criteria. A mathematical characterization of a musical phrase permits various visualization techniques of the figure. In accord with philosophical concepts, the pattern is perfectly represented by an envelope which is a tangent surface at a set of notes in a polyphonic score. Two image models are discussed in this paper. The first is based on the B-spline surfaces smoothing a discrete musical event set in the space: height-duration-timbre. The second performs the Discrete Fourier Transform signature of the digital musical signal.