GUIDO Music Notation

Jordan SmithMUMT 611

24 January 2008

OverviewGUIDO is a music notation language.

1. GUIDO’s goals2. How GUIDO notates music3. How GUIDO engraves music4. GUIDO applications:

– Gide– NoteServer– SALIERI– MIR

5. Pros and Cons of GUIDO

Guido d’Arezzo

• Credited with inventing music notation

Image source: http://nrm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guido_van_Arezzo.jpg

1. Neumatic Notation

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Neume2.jpg

2. Conventional Music Notation

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bachlut1.gif

3. Modern Engraving

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chopin_Prelude_No._7.JPG

4. GUIDO Music Notation

{ [\title<"No.3"> \tempo<"Andantino">

\staff<1> \clef<"g"> \key<+1> \meter<"3/8">

\i<"p"> d2/8 |

\sl(\dim(d h1)) h

\sl(\dim(h g)) g

\sl(\cresc(f# a c2))

\sl(c h1) ],

[ \staff<2> \clef<"g">

\key<+1> \meter<"3/8">

_/8 |

h1 _ _

g _ h0

\sl(c1 f# a)

\sl(a g)]

}

Example source: http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/demos.html

1. GUIDO’s goals

• Adequacy:– Simple musical concepts are simple to

encode– Only more complex concepts are complicated

to encode

Adequacy

Renz 2002 p. 9, 18

1. GUIDO’s goals

• Adequacy:– Simple musical concepts are simple to

encode

• Human readability

Human readability

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE score-partwise PUBLIC "-//Recordare//DTD MusicXML 2.0 Partwise//EN" "http://www.musicxml.org/dtds/partwise.dtd"> <score-partwise version="2.0"> <part-list> <score-part id="P1"> <part-name>Music</part-name> </score-part> </part-list> <part id="P1"> <measure number="1"> <attributes> <divisions>1</divisions> <key> <fifths>0</fifths> </key> <time> <beats>4</beats> <beat-type>4</beat-type> </time> <clef> <sign>G</sign> <line>2</line> </clef> </attributes> <note> <pitch> <step>C</step> <octave>4</octave> </pitch> <duration>4</duration> <type>whole</type> </note> </measure> </part> </score-partwise>

[ \clef<"treble"> \meter<"4/4"> c/1 ]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicXML

1. GUIDO’s goals

• Adequacy:– Simple musical concepts are simple to

encode

• Human readability

• Perfect formatting

• Multifunctional

2. Notation

• Basic Notation• Advanced Notation• Extended Notation

2. Notation

• Basic notation[ Sequences ]

{ Segments }

c do d&& bis1*1/4

\clef<“treble”>

all together: [ \slur( f g {f/2, a2, c}) ]

2. Notation

• Advanced notation\slurBegin:1 … \slurEnd:1

\clef<type=“g2”, size=0.5>

\glissando<style=“wavy”,dx1=2mm,dy1=1.5hs … >

2. Notation

• Extended notationMicro-tonal features

Exact timing

User-defined GUIDO tags and events

3. Engraving

• Translation between abstract representation (AR) and graphical representation (GR)

GUIDO file > (parse) > AR > (physics) > GR

3. Engraving

Renz 2002 p. 88

3. Engraving

Renz 2002 p. 94

3. Engraving

Renz 2002 p. 97

4. Applications: NoteServer(and NoteViewer)

• Quickly create passages of music for any purpose: pedagogy, WEB, etc.

4. Applications: Gide

• A syntax highlight editor for GUIDO files

4. Applications: SALIERI

• A structure-oriented environment for composition, manipulation, and analysis of music.

(Think MATLAB.)

Hoos, Kilian et al. 1998

Hoos, Kilian et al. 1998

4. Applications: MIR abilitiesStep 1. Create database using PERL (GUIDO is

text-based)

Step 2. Pre-calculate transition probability matrices for absolute pitch and rhythm of each element in database

Step 3. Hierarchically cluster pieces

Step 4. Search!

5. Pros and Cons of GUIDOi. Incomplete, and inactive

since 2003– Extended notation and

postscript output of NoteViewer are missing

ii. Is being human-writable an asset?

iii. Poor at representing the vertical and horizontal simultaneously

i. Translates to and from major formats: XML, Finale, Sibelius.

ii. Perhaps not for authoring, but it is certainly human-editable

iii. …like every other computer-based format!

• Plus, it’s complete.

…but…

Question period!

BibliographyHoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel, Kai Renz, Jürgen Kilian. 1998. The GUIDO Notation Format: A

Novel Approach for Adequately Representing Score-Level Music. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: 451-4.

Hoos, Holger H., Jurgen Kilian, Kai Renz, Thomas Helbich. 1998. SALIERI: A General, Interactive Computer Music System. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: 385-392.

Hoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel, Kai Renz. 1999. Using Advanced GUIDO as a Notation Interchange Format. ICMC ’99 Proceedings: 395-8.

Hoos, Holger H., Kai Renz, Marko Görg. 2001. GUIDO/MIR: an Experimental Musical Information Retrieval System based on GUIDO Music Notation. ISMIR ’01 Proceedings: 41-50.

Hoos, Holger H., Keith A. Hamel. 2004. The GUIDO Music Notation Format Version 1.0. Specification Part 1: Basic GUIDO. http://www.salieri.org/GUIDO/docu/spec1.htm (accessed 23 January 2008).

Renz, Kai, Holger H. Hoos. 1998 A WEB-based Approach to Music Notation using GUIDO. ICMC ’98 Proceedings: 455-8.

Renz, Kai. 2002. Algorithms and Data Structures for a Music Notation System based on GUIDO Music Notation. PhD diss., Darmstadt University of Technology.