ENP: A System for Contemporary Music Notation

The focus of attention of this paper is a music notation application, the Expressive Notation Package or ENP, conceived by Mika Kuuskankare. We explore some important design issues, through examples dealing with user interface design, music representation, and semantics. Our applications relate closely to computer-assisted composition. In this paper we deal particularly with contemporary music notation. The notational examples, all of which are based on real contemporary scores, attempt to illustrate several important, and at times unusual, design decisions. All of these scores share a common underlying representation, a hierarchical model for music representation that aims for the combination of representational simplicity, notational flexibility, and extensibility. The ENP system aims to let composers make their own aesthetic decisions—including decisions affecting music notation.