Music Notation Using Reactive Synchronous Programming

This article presents a notation system for music based on patterns (or clips) as they have been popularized for more than twenty years with the Digital Audio Workstations on the market like Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio or FL Studio. This system named Skini uses the HipHop.js programming language to describe music pieces. This language, belonging to the family of synchronous reactive languages, was initially designed for the orchestration of Web services. Skini, by combining HipHop.js and queuing mechanisms, was developed for interactive and generative music performances. It has also proven to be an efficient tool for notating musical pieces outside of these interactive and generative contexts because of its ability to describe the structure of a piece of music in a form close to its expression in eve- ryday language. Moreover, Skini, while using certain con- cepts specific to electronic music, can be used for the cre- ation and performance of instrumental and orchestral music.