Bernard Bel
A contribution to The Ratio Symposium, 14-16 Dec. 1992, Den Haag (The Netherlands). Published in Barlow, Clarence (ed.) The Ratio Book. Den Haag: Royal Conservatory - Institute of Sonology. 2001: 86-101. This paper is referenced on HAL ⟨hal-00134179⟩ and quoted in Polymetric structures.
Abstract
This paper deals with various problems of quantifying musical time that arise both in the analysis of traditional drumming and in computer-generated musical pieces based on "sound-objects", i.e. sequences of code that control a real-time sound processor.
Section 1 suggests that syntactic approaches may be closer to the intuitions of musicians and musicologists than commonly advocated numerical approaches. Furthermore, symbolic-numerical approaches lead to efficient and elegant solutions of constraint satisfaction problems with respect to symbolic and physical durations, as illustrated in Sections 2 and 3, respectively.