Aspect-Oriented Music Representation

Patrick Hill, Simon Holland and Robin Laney

Project Objectives

This project devised, and now continues to refine and investigate, ways in which Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns (MDSOC) approaches can be applied to the organization of musical materials for the purposes of music composition and musical analysis.

Project Description

Aspect Oriented Programming is a generic term applied to an emerging set of technologies that facilitate separation of concerns in programming by enabling developers more easily to manage issues of cross-cutting tangling and scattering in programming and software development. While musical composition is quite different from programming or software development, nevertheless, at an abstract level, commonalities and common issues can be identified, making it useful to investigate the adaption and application of AOP techniques to address problems that exist in organising and shaping materials for music composition.

Selected Publications from the AOMR project

  • Hill, P., Holland, S., and Laney, R. (2007) An Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Music Representation. In Computer Music Journal, Winter 2007 31:4), 28 pp. 46-56, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pre-Print
  • Hill, P., Holland, S., and Laney, R. (2006). Symmetric composition of musical concerns. In Proceedings of the 5th international Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development. ACM Press, New York, NY, pp 226-236. AOSD Aspect music.pdf
  • Hill, Patrick and Holland, Simon and Laney, Robin (2004) Applying aspect-oriented programming to music computing. In: Agon, Carlos and Assayag, Gerard, (eds). SMC04 Conference Proceedings: First Sound and Music Computing Conference. Services Des Publications, IRCAM, Paris, pp. 169-165. A version of this paper can be found at TR2004_02.pdf
  • Hill, P., Holland, S., Laney, R. (2004) Using Dynamic Aspects in Music Composition Systems. In Proceedings of the 2004 Dynamic Aspects Workshop (DAW04). Eds. Robert E. Filman, Michael Haupt, Katharina Mehner and Mira Mezini. University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England, March 22-26 2004. Published by the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California as TR04.01 Pages 89-97. TR 2004_17.pdf
  • Hill, P., Holland, S., Laney, R. (2003) Using Aspects to Help Composers. Technical Report 2003/21, Department of Computing, The Open University, Milton Keynes. TR 2003_21.pdf

Code and Tutorials

AspectMusic source code
AspectMusic for Java Tutorial R2.pdf
AspectMusicScore.pdf