The Elody music composition environment proposes lambda-abstraction on musical structures as a fundamental mechanism to represent user-defined musical concepts and compositional processes. The user can define new musical concepts either on top of concrete musical objects by generalizing them via an abstraction operation, or by composing and transforming previously defined abstractions. As the paper will show through several examples, this approach leads to a qu... Lire la suite

The Elody music composition environment proposes lambda-abstraction on musical structures as a fundamental mechanism to represent user-defined musical concepts and compositional processes. The user can define new musical concepts either on top of concrete musical objects by generalizing them via an abstraction operation, or by composing and transforming previously defined abstractions. As the paper will show through several examples, this approach leads to a quite natural formalization as well as a convenient active notation for many musical notions and compositional techniques.

This article presents an approach in the design of music programming languages based on Lambda Calculus. It shows, through several examples, that a purely descriptive language, that is to say a language without any programming capability, can be equipped with programming capabilities by the addition of a limited number of simple constructs.