Annotating Symbolic Texture in Piano Music: A Formal Syntax

Symbolic texture describes how sounding components are organized in a musical score. Along with other high-level musical components such as melody, harmony or rhythm, symbolic texture has a significant impact on the structure and the style of a musical piece. In this article, we present a syntax to describe compositional texture in the specific case of Western classical piano music. The syntax is expressive and flexible, unifying into a single text label information about density, diversity, musical function and note relationships in distinct textural units. The formal definition of the syntax enables its parsing and computational processing, opening promising perspectives in computer-aided music analysis and composition. We provide an implementation to parse and manipulate textural labels as well as a bestiary of annotated examples of textural configurations.