Note : music scores are excluded from this version due to author's and publishing copyright laws. 

 

Abstract

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The main goal of this work is to solve some of the difficulties that composers encounter when notating music. Firstly, we describe how the Western musical notation (WMN) is limited when attempting to write particular musical elements. Secondly, we show the possible advantages that multimedia writing (MW) could offer on the notation of such elements. To address these issues, we used MW in six “experiments/composition projects” that were conceived to answer specific notation questions. The results obtained thereof allowed us to demonstrate the efficacy of MW for overcoming current limitations in music notation. More specifically, MW constitutes a group of procedures that allows to simultaneously represent information in different ways. This information could be either text, sounds, still or moving images, among others. Such procedures can be used to note down a message to further save it and transfer it from the composer to the performer. In the context of musical composition and in our experimental paradigms, MW has proven to be efficient for: the notation of timber, the integration of musicians from oral tradition in mixed music works, the incorporation of instrumental techniques drawn from oral tradition music into written music, the integration of a tonal language in a music score, the notation of new instrumental and vocal techniques, the guidance at using new software, and the incorporation of expressiveness associated to music styles of oral tradition into written works. We consider that two types of notation that proved to be efficient in this research could be added to the body of already existing MW, namely auditive notation and the notation of a know-how by the means of video.

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​Justification de la mention pour la thèse

"Il s’agit d’une thèse remarquable pour son équilibre entre recherche et création, entre musique et théories, entre arts et sciences. Cette thèse et sa soutenance ont fait preuve d’une rare capacité de travail de la part de la doctorante, de son autonomie de travail et de ses capacités d’innovation, tant au plan technique que musical. La clarté méthodologique de ce travail, de même que la qualité de la rédaction en français doivent aussi être soulignées (...) " 
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​Martin Laliberté, Président du jury de thèse.