UC San Diego

The current research applies the Abjad API for Formalized Score Control (Bača, Oberholtzer, and Adán, 1997--present) in compositional and analytic contexts to demonstrate specific recommendations for the design of automated notation systems, expand the system's application into computational musicology, and formalize the algorithmic tendencies of the author's compositional praxis. First, a concise review of the literature summarizes the history of object-oriented programming, proposes a framework for understanding automated notation systems, and makes recommendations for the design of object-oriented programming systems for composers. Next, two step-by-step literature examples recreate the typographical details of previously composed scores as interpreter sessions; this yields a historically informed assessment of the API's abilities and drawbacks, contributes to a body of pedagogical examples for new users, and implicitly offers an analysis of the modeled works. In a third chapter, the API is used to quantize and notate data extracted from several recorded performances of a single musical work, illustrating the ways in which traditional musical notation can be extended to visualize multidimensional data for computational musicology. Lastly, to demonstrate the efficacy of the API in the context of an individual compositional practice, the fourth and final chapter discusses the author's uses of the system as the continuation of an extant algorithmic composition practice