A lecture by Adam Siska

Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest

Although Quintet.net is an appropriate tool for networked, real-time performances, until now it could use only static score sources
(scores previously engraved with the Score Editor of the Quintet.net CDK). On the other hand, there were professional software to
produce musical data in real-time since a long time ago. JMSL is one of these professional environments, which is able to produce
algorithmical music data in real-time.

The evident claim of connecting these two environments, however, raises to several problems to resolve. As there is a conceptual
difference between the data models used by these two systems, an external tool must be developed to carry out the conversion between these data models. Although it would be enough a simple data conversion tool, the need for future expansion possibilities leads to the developement of a stand-alone translator object with its own, extended data model.

This data model must be planned with the aim of getting a structure which would be able to represent scores imported from many
different formats. To obtain this, it’ll proved that although tree structures could be used to represent many scores, they are basically not good enough to represent any kind of score. With this in mind, we’ll present a new data model that has the structure of a directed graph.

This is a good decision, as tree structures are subsets of directed graphs – so data importing issues can easily be solved – and directed graphs can hold musical information that trees can’t hold in some cases presented below as well.

As Quintet.net doesn’t have an own – automatized – engraving tool, an engraving tool is to be developed and added to the data
exporting module as well. This engraving tool has to be as simple as possible, however, some parameters should be set externally to take control over the exact behaviour of the engraver. With this last step, we’ll be able to send musical data obtained with algorithmical routines of JMSL to the Quintet.net score engine in real-time, thus we’ll manage to enter to the world of real-time network music performances based on dynamically created music material.

Pipelining between JMSL and Quintet.net. Paper by Ádám Siska