The Computational Tablature. The Numerics Archetype (for Cello)

"The Numerics: A Computational Tablature"

Bil Smith

In 2015, on SoundMorphology, I introduced The Numerics: a compositional archetype that does not merely reimagine notation, but displaces it entirely, reconstituting the score as a computational medium. Rendered through numerical data engineered for modified cello performance, The Numerics proceeds from a single, uncompromising premise: sequences of durations, pitch indices, and micro-dynamics are not supplemental annotations appended to conventional notation. They are the composition itself. Each number functions simultaneously as instruction and structural node, a dual ontology that gives rise to what I call a contextualized numerical architecture, wherein the score and its execution are, in principle, inseparable.

Numeric Scores as Performative Systems

The Numerics poses a question that is, at once, philosophical and technical: what is fundamentally altered when glyphs surrender to values? The cellist receives a tablature built from integers and decimal points, each mapped to pitch, duration, bow pressure, or harmonic index. Reading becomes real-time translation, pattern resolving into gesture, computation dissolving into corporeal music. The performer does not interpret a symbol. They execute a value, and in that execution, become a processing engine of a higher order.

Contextualization and Referential Coding

No datum in The Numerics exists in isolation. A "6" may designate G♯ on the third string under heavy bow pressure; a "0.5" may encode staccato or microglissando. Meaning is never intrinsic; it is always relational, always contingent upon a performative grammar established at rehearsal and internalized through practice. This is not vagueness. It is precision of a different kind: a living code-language in which the performer's intelligence is not a supplement to the score, but its necessary condition of existence.

Generative and Adaptive Performance

Because The Numerics is computational in its essence, it is also generative in its potential. Performers may apply Fibonacci proportions to bow velocity, invert duration sequences, transpose rhythmic arrays, or derive new value sets through algorithmic manipulation of existing ones. The score does not prescribe a singular reading; it establishes a numerical platform from which an indefinite series of structurally coherent performances may be generated. Each iteration is both faithful to the architecture and irreducibly its own event.

Toward a New Notational Paradigm

The Numerics does not extend the history of Western notation. It breaks from it. The score is no longer a static artifact to be transcribed into sound; it is data to be parsed, processed, and performed. It inaugurates a hybrid condition in which scores are computational objects, performers are algorithmic agents, and notation functions as a live interface rather than a historical document. The decimal point, once a mere delimiter of subdivision, becomes something else entirely: not a proscription, but a threshold, a portal into a practice where composition, computation, and performance are no longer distinct acts, but a single, continuous, irreversible operation.

W.I.P.>>>>>

 

WET Scores Invite a Reconsideration of Traditional Pedagogical Approaches

"Craters" A WET Score for Solo Soprano Voice

In the discourse of musical notation, traditionally demarcated by the unequivocal employment of conventional symbols (notes, rests, and the like) the introduction of what I term 'WET' scores (an acronym standing for Words, Events, Text) heralds a deviation towards a more linguistically oriented method of musical transcription and interpretation.

This deviation, it seems, aligns closely with Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, particularly his exploration of language games, by suggesting a foundational shift in how music might be notated and understood. The proposition at hand posits a thought experiment: Suppose music notation, from its inception, had been rooted in language, both written and spoken, rather than in the established symbols of musical tradition. The implications of such a conjecture are indeed vast, prompting a reevaluation of the role of language in music culture and education.

The essence of WET scores lies in their capacity to reframe musical composition and performance within the context of linguistic communication. By doing so, they challenge performers to engage with music on a level that transcends traditional notational boundaries, encouraging a dialogue with the score that is as much about interpretation as it is about execution. This reorientation towards a linguistic-based system of notation compels us to reconsider the nature of musical meaning, suggesting that it may be more fluid and context-dependent than previously acknowledged.

Wittgenstein's philosophical inquiry into the nature and function of language offers a pertinent framework for understanding the radical potential of WET scores. Just as he proposed that the meaning of words is inherently tied to their use within specific language games, so too might we consider that the meaning of musical phrases—and indeed, the notation by which they are represented—can only be fully understood within the context of their performance and interpretation.

This perspective challenges the notion of music as a language of absolute meanings, suggesting instead that its significance may be as variable and nuanced as that of spoken and written language.

By proposing the adoption of language as the primary means of conveying musical ideas, WET scores invite a reconsideration of traditional pedagogical approaches. This shift implies a more integrative view of music education, one that recognizes the inherent interconnectivity between linguistic and musical expression. The question then arises: Could the teaching of music benefit from a closer alignment with the teaching of language, in which sound, emotion, and performance are conveyed through the nuances of linguistic expression?

The implications of this thought experiment extend beyond the realm of music notation and education, touching upon broader philosophical debates about the nature of meaning, interpretation, and communication. WET scores, by blurring the distinctions between the linguistic and the musical, challenge us to consider the ways in which these domains might enrich and inform one another. In doing so, they not only offer a novel approach to musical composition and performance but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities of human expression.

 

Performance Guidance for a Soloist: Notes on a New Piano Score

For the past few weeks I have been posting pages from a new score for solo piano. What you have seen is the core: staves that move between familiar notational signs and alternate tablatures, spatial cues that stretch time, color fields that behave like dynamics, symbols that suggest attack or touch rather than pitch alone. The pages look finished, yet they are only the hull. This work lives equally in what I call Performance Guidance, a set of parallel documents that are longer than the core score and just as binding on the imagination.

Cardboard Ready-Made (a.k.a. Thomas Demand)

How the pages are made

My studio moves between screens and benches, vector paths and stained rags. On the digital side I work across the Adobe Creative Suite. Illustrator carries the glyph families and proportional grids. Photoshop holds the surface weather, abrasions, and accumulated micro-histories. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension let me model notational depths, cast shadows from signs onto other signs, and proof how a symbol reads when it behaves like an object. InDesign assembles the folios and keeps the structure legible. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find elsewhere. The Astute Manager plug-ins extend precision and chance in equal measure. Topaz Gigapixel is a finishing tool when a plate must scale for the wall without surrendering grain.

Page from Core Score

The analog bench is just as crowded. Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils talk to the page first, then I bring in less dutiful materials: film strips, mica flakes, molten salt, conductive ink, xylene, fur, saffron, colored pencil layered into metallic spray foam, liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, thermochromic and photochromic metallic paints that change their mind with light and warmth, even traces sculpted by methylene chloride. I do not treat these as special effects. They are extensions of the instrument. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air. The page should answer in kind.

Segment from Core Score with Crafted Neologisms

What you are looking at

The posted leaves show two things at once. They carry a performable top line for any pianist who can live with alternate reading, and they display a map of behaviors that the Performance Guidance activates. The symbols are less about dictation than about permission. A cluster in ink might function as a corridor, a pattern of pedaling, or a local choice between resonance and refusal. Traditional notation appears where certainty is needed, often as a point of return after a detour through the graphical systems.

Customized Crafted Pill with Neologism for the Core Score

The Guidance

Alongside the score sits a portfolio of texts. It includes a short story, a radio drama, a sonnet, a memoir, a privacy policy, a weather log, and a short parody. Each may be read privately as preparation or folded into the performance as spoken or projected material. Some performers will stage the texts, others will let them haunt the playing from inside.

Why put literature next to a piano part. Because performance is not only a chain of actions. It is a stack of attentions. The pianist carries body memory, social memory, and the present air of the room. The Guidance addresses those layers in different dialects.

Footnotes from the Short Story

• Short story. Narrative teaches arc. A story invites the pianist to steer tension and release across a span larger than a phrase. Read it before playing and you will shape rubato with a novelist’s patience. Speak parts of it aloud and time becomes architectural, a set of rooms the music must cross.

• Radio drama. Radio reminds us that signal and noise share a wall. The pianist learns how to color loudness without volume, how to move a scene with only rhythm and timbre. If performed, the drama becomes a second instrument that frames the keyboard like a soundstage.

• Sonnet. Fourteen lines teach proportion. The rhyme logic, even when it is slant or hidden, calibrates breath and cadence. The sonnet’s turn becomes a hinge for a musical modulation. It is a clinic in inevitability.

• Memoir. First person writing encourages risk and intimacy. The memoir is an ethics policy disguised as memory. It asks for tone without decoration, sincerity without cliché. That discipline helps the pianist place a single sustained note without apology.

• Privacy policy. Bureaucratic language has its own poetry. Clauses, subclauses, consent, exceptions. This text models rigor and care. It shapes a performer’s sense of boundary, what can be disclosed and what must remain secret inside the keys. Read aloud, it becomes percussion.

• Weather log. Barometric drift is a tempo map. Cloud, pressure, wind, visibility. The log gives the pianist a way to grade dynamics as if shading a sky. Moving from scattered to broken to overcast teaches gradation better than any decibel scale.

• Parody. Comedy is a lesson in timing. The parody invites the player to break character and then recover, to test how far a gesture can stretch before it snaps. It also keeps the room human.

The point is not to decorate a recital. The point is to enlarge authorship. The pianist is asked to make choices that are not only technical but ethical and narrative, to hear the score as a site where multiple literacies meet. This Guidance treats preparation as part of composition. When a performer reads, the music has already begun.

Core Score Element (Statue of a Deity, Cotton sculpture, Shamtazz!)

Why length matters

People notice that the Guidance is longer than the core score. That is intentional. The notes we put on a staff are a small region of the performance’s territory. By making the paratext heavier, I weight the performer’s imagination. I want rehearsal to be audible in the final account. The tradition of “performance notes” often sits at the back of a part like a footnote. Here it moves to the front and assumes the size of a partner.

Notational Iconography created in Illustrator

On interpretation

None of this cancels clarity. The pages include conventional notation where it serves the argument: voices that must align, pedal figures that depend on exact distances, attacks that need standard names. The alternate tablatures do not obscure pitch so much as redirect attention. Some passages draw the eye over the page like a path in sand. Others freeze the gaze until a threshold is crossed. The pianist learns to read with the whole body.

Closing

When I am asked what tools I use, I answer with the list because the list matters. The software gives me precision and an elastic patience for revision. The analog bench gives me friction and a place for chance. The substances stain, flake, burnish, and change. Those changes become part of the score’s instruction, a reminder that a page is a living surface, not a transparent window.

The work is written for a soloist, yet it assumes an ensemble of selves: reader, actor, witness, technician, timekeeper. The Guidance recruits all of them. What you hear in performance is the piano, of course, but you also hear weather moving across paper, policy negotiating consent, a memory saying yes, a joke arriving on time, a sonnet turning its corner. That is the music I want to share.

The Power of Visual Representation: A Discussion on Non-Traditional Art Music Scores

Premise: when a score stops acting like a conveyor belt for time and starts behaving like a field seeing becomes the first form of listening. This discussion is an attempt to surface what that shift changes: for composers, performers, publishers, and anyone who treats the page as an instrument.

What counts as a score?

Traditional notation optimizes for serial time: left→right, barlines, a clock hidden in symbols. Non-traditional scores optimize for navigation. Time is inferred from distance, density, or adjacency; meaning emerges through positional decisions. The score is no longer a disappearing medium; it insists on being seen.

Discussion prompt: if a score invites navigation rather than execution, does authorship move from “the composer decides in advance” to “the ensemble decides in the room”? What do we gain or lose in that transfer?

Visual lineages that inform today’s scores

Non-traditional notation doesn’t arise from music alone. It borrows methods from contemporary art:

• Jenny Holzer shows how text as public instrument works.  Her scale and placement do rhetorical work before content is parsed. In text-forward scores, typography becomes timing; a bold imperative or a small whispering line already shapes performance before meaning is decoded.

• Karel Martens models rule-based typography that remains alive: constrained palettes, modular units, repeated grids. Scores learn to build grammars (colors, shapes, increments) that scale across a work without drowning in ornament.

• Marcel Broodthaers makes classification visible and strange. Legends, keys, taxonomies in scores are not clerical; they are theater. What counts, what is withheld, and how categories steer interpretation are compositional acts.

• Damien Hirst turns seriality into a reading discipline. Vast dot fields make tiny anomalies meaningful; likewise, serial modules in scores let micro-choice matter.

• Ed Ruscha treats words as images and books as time-based devices. Scores that think in spreads... a page as unit, sequence as form inherit that book logic directly.

• John Baldessari teaches withholding: colored masks that focus attention by occluding. Scores that employ cut-outs, overlays, and masked areas create time inside the page.

• Alberto Burri insists that subtraction is operative. Burnt, sutured, perforated surfaces transform the page into relief; absence becomes a playable event.

Add adjacent anchors. Lucio Fontana’s cuts (aperture as gesture), Sol LeWitt’s instructions (the idea as executable plan), Yoko Ono’s event scores (poetics as trigger), and music’s own line (Earle Brown’s December 1952, Cardew’s Treatise, Xenakis’s architectonics). The through-line is not style but procedure: scale, sequence, taxonomy, subtraction, rule-sets.

Discussion prompt: which of these procedures translate most cleanly into rehearsal (and which risk becoming mere visual flourish)?

Functional consequences for performers

Spatial scores shift labor from counting to wayfinding.

• Triangulation: players fix position via landmarks (color nodes, shapes, typographic cues).

• Local leadership: authority migrates by zone; global time gives way to situational time.

• Rehearsal as research: each session tests routes, not merely repeats passages; annotations become a stratigraphy for future realizations.

Discussion prompt: does this redistribution of responsibility make ensembles more collaborative or just more fragile? Where is the line between empowering interpretation and offloading compositional work?

Ethics and politics: readability, resistance, responsibility

Spatial notation is not just a new look; it encodes positions:

• Resistance to extractive consumption: non-excerptable forms frustrate playlist culture and “greatest-bar” programming.

• Temporal thickening: pages that demand time challenge production models optimized for throughput.

• Opacity as ethics: in an economy that values frictionless parsing (by people and machines), some illegibility protects nuance and prevents flattening.

Counterpoint: opacity can become gatekeeping. If a score is difficult to the point of exclusion, who is the audience, and who is left out?

Accessibility: complexity without exclusion

Well-made visual scores can be more inclusive than traditional notation if designed with constraints:

• Contrast and redundancy: pair color with shape/pattern so meaning survives grayscale and color-blind contexts.

• Capped symbol families: limit concurrency; stage information in layers.

• Dyslexia-aware type: spacing and forms that reduce visual crowding.

• Physical scale: format for actual rehearsal distances and lighting realities.

Discussion prompt: what are the minimum accessibility commitments a visual score should meet to be ethically performable?

Two readers: humans and machines

Scores now meet archival systems, OCR, and LLMs alongside performers.

• Canonical legends: publish a one-page legend in machine-readable form; humans gain clarity, archives gain longevity.

• Layered files: vector layers per symbol family enable analysis without flattening the art.

• Resistant design (where needed): context-locked symbols and masked zones remain legible in the room while resisting frictionless scraping.

Discussion prompt: should composers design for machine legibility at all or is resistance the more responsible stance?

Practical heuristics (offered as questions, not rules)

For composers

• What is my grammar (a small set of primitives)? Can performers learn it in 10 minutes?

• Where does scale do work (large = consensus, small = intimacy)?

• What must be withheld and when (occlusion as temporal device)?

• Can the legend read like a Holzer truism.  Clear, short, actionable?

• What does subtraction do here (cut-outs, voids, pauses)?

For performers

• How will we map routes together (wayfinding sessions before sound)?

• Which landmarks become shared cues?

• What residue (annotations, recordings, paths) will we leave for the next reading?

For publishers/archivists

• Can we distribute a legend card and layered source alongside the print?

• What’s our policy on machine access vs. resistant formats?

Points of contention worth arguing about

• Illegibility vs. rigor: when does difficulty become empty posture?

• Authorship vs. agency: how much decision-making should a score delegate?

• Documentation vs. work: are recordings and marked parts co-equal outputs or satellites?

• Standardization vs. local idiom: is there value in a shared symbol commons or does local grammar protect diversity?

These are not problems to eliminate; they are productive tensions that keep the practice alive.

Why this matters now

Visual representation changes the terms of attention. It slows extraction, invites negotiation, and reframes performance as collective reading. In a culture tuned to instant adequacy, that friction is not a bug; it’s the form’s critical function. The page is not décor... it is infrastructure.

Closing invitation: treat the next score you encounter as a site. Don’t ask first how to count it; ask how to enter it. Trace a path, name a landmark, agree on a legend. If seeing becomes the first act of listening, the music will already have begun

Glyphic Overload and the Semiotic Failstate: A Critical Examination of Radical Notation in Contemporary Composition

New Composition for Soprano Saxophone in progress using Syntax-to-Gesture Conversion Logic

In the landscape of experimental composition, where notation is increasingly seen not merely as an instruction but as gesture, surface, and site, the radicalization of graphical systems often leads to a paradox: the intensification of signifiers precipitates the erosion of signification itself. This phenomenon, which I refer to as glyphic overload, marks the saturation point of visual codes where the density and novelty of glyphs obstruct rather than illuminate the intended sonic or performative outcomes. Its corollary is the semiotic failstate, a collapse of meaning where notational excess overwhelms both performer cognition and the symbolic contract between composer and interpreter.

This article investigates how avant-garde compositional practices, particularly those that embrace dense, non-linear, and non-linguistic notation navigate (or succumb to) these phenomena. Drawing from semiotics, visual poetics, and post-structural theory, I propose a framework for understanding radical notation not only as a communicative system but as an ontological critique of music’s epistemic scaffolding.

Glyphic Overload: When the Score Becomes a Surface

From Staff to Field

Traditional Western notation operates under the assumption of linearity, modularity, and codified hierarchy. Radical notation subverts these, often presenting the score as a cartographic field rather than a temporal line. With this shift, the score ceases to be a transparent medium and instead becomes a textured surface, one that demands to be read more as an image than a code.

In this context, glyphs proliferate (symbols, hybrid marks, abstract signs, invented scripts) all aimed at extending the expressive vocabulary of the score. Yet this proliferation generates noise: when too many signs vie for attention without a stable grammar, the eye and mind collapse under the visual weight. The glyph becomes opaque, not revelatory.

The Aesthetics of Excess

Glyphic overload is not merely a technical problem; it is aesthetic and philosophical. It reflects the composer's desire to encode ontic multiplicity to collapse time, texture, gesture, and timbre into singular inscriptions. In doing so, the score aspires to totality and fails precisely because it cannot be total. It gestures toward a sublime of over-notation, an unreachable density that resists performance as much as it demands it.

The Semiotic Failstate: When Meaning Dislocates

Breakdown of the Contract

Radical notation operates on a fragile contract between symbol and behavior. The semiotic failstate arises when this contract dissolves and the performer can no longer reliably map glyph to gesture, or when the interpretive flexibility exceeds the composer’s structural intentions.

Unlike aleatoric music, where indeterminacy is embedded into the score’s logic, the failstate is unintentional. It is not liberation, but disintegration. It results in symbolic drift, wherein signs become semantically unmoored and the performer's interpretive actions default to intuition rather than inscription.

Asymmetry of Literacy

Another factor contributing to the failstate is asymmetric notational literacy. Radical scores often require highly specialized interpretive communities, yet they are disseminated in contexts where such literacy is absent or underdeveloped. The semiotic failstate, in this view, is sociological as much as structural: a breakdown in the shared semiotic economy necessary for the score to function.

Toward a Post-Glyphic Schema: Strategies of Resistance

Constraint as Clarity

Some composers counter glyphic overload through constraint-based systems by limiting symbols, compressing expression into minimalist gestures, or leveraging repetition as structural anchor. This is not a retreat from radicalism but a strategic reduction to avoid visual entropy.

Asemic Notation

Asemic notation, which foregrounds the illegibility of the glyph, embraces the failstate and reframes it as a performative condition. In this schema, notation is not a map but a field of triggers which are non-representational, somatically activated. The semiotic failstate is no longer a failure, but a site of multiplicity and reinvention.

Performativity as Syntax

By reorienting notation toward the performative gesture itself, some radical scores adopt movement syntax embedding bodily actions as the base language rather than abstract symbols. This reframes notation as kinesis rather than icon, resisting overload by shifting the locus of meaning from page to body.

The Score as Event Horizon

Glyphic overload and the semiotic failstate represent the limits of notation.  They become thresholds where symbol ceases to symbolize and instead becomes matter. They are not merely problems to be solved but phenomena to be understood. In radical compositional schema, these limits force a confrontation with what it means to write music, to read it, and ultimately to perform it.

The future of experimental notation may not lie in the invention of more symbols, but in the reimagining of what signs can do. The glyph may fade, but in its failure, something else...be it tactile, temporal, and/or emergent may begin to speak.

"To Maintain A Certain Might" for Violin: With Commentary from Gabe Hudson

 

TO MAINTAIN A CERTAIN MIGHT

2018-2023

10 Images. 24” X 9”; 61 X 22.9 cm.

Ink, Dry Ice, Black Oil Paint, Black Watercolor, Gouache (black), Solar Ink, Walnut Ink, Chalk, Liquid Ruthenium, Ochre Pigment Powder, Manganese Dioxide Powder, Dry hermochromic pigment Powder, Acrylic on Epson Signature Worthy Velvet Fine Art.

Edition of 6 with 2 APs

 Commentary from Gabe Hudson

It begins with a whisper. A chemical hush. Not in sound, but in media: Dry Ice and Liquid Ruthenium, crushed into something that approaches notation only through the bold nerve of its presumption. A stave becomes a sediment; clefs dissolve into Manganese Dioxide; the ink itself rebels into ochre particulates and thermochromic hesitation. This is a violin score that remembers music the way an artifact remembers a ritual.  It knows its shape, but not its source.

“To Maintain a Certain Might” is not merely a title.  It is a challenge, an invocation, and a betrayal. What does it mean for a piece of music to hold might? Not just sonic force, but resistance, secrecy, presence. Each of the ten pages unfolds like a scroll of war correspondence from a world where harmony has been outlawed and only solar ink and chalky whispers remain.

The materials are not incidental; they are arguments. The black gouache crusts in corners like regret. Walnut ink drips in lines too deliberate to be accidental, too inconsistent to be directive. Here we enter Chabon’s territory: where nostalgia for order is betrayed by the seduction of the baroque. The score does not ask to be played; it dares to be interpreted, with each graphic unit, be it pharmaceutical syllable (“Thalirenol,” “Cutibax,” “Aldutor”), or near-asemic rupture serving as a narrative shard from a world adjacent to ours, though darker, denser, more holy.

Indeed, it reads like the script of an invented pharmacopoeia, a blacklisted pharmacological opera that might have been composed by a fugitive chemist, writing to outwit regulation or God. The strings of text:  “tru-4 tru-4 tru-4,” “Hepacine Tristryl,” “Macrodene Aceranon,” “Jysity-revola”are neither instructions nor ingredients but talismans, each syllable both invocation and inoculation. This is language as curse, language as salvage.

And then there is the shape. The vertical bleed of black oils and rust powders gives each page the look of having been stored improperly on purpose. The score seems unearthed rather than printed, the ink bleeding backward through time. The staff lines and text do not simply overlay the paper, but they seem to have erupted through it.

One page features a mirrored typographic echo of “LuppiLuppi”, and for a moment one thinks of Chabon’s Golems and Kavalier ghosts, names that double and repeat until they crumble under their own pressure. This is the kind of violin score that might have emerged from the ruins of a library in Prague or beneath the stage of a forgotten Yiddish theater, the violinist long gone, but the ghosts still hungry.

The agency required of the performer is immense, bordering on cruel. It’s not simply about realizing a pitch or a rhythm, but about conjuring a myth. One does not play this score so much as interpret its residue, like a scholar of medieval maps decoding notations for dragons and lost continents. Each gesture on the violin must answer a visual provocation: “What does a black gouache blister sound like?” “How does one bow a thermochromic ellipse?”

At its most intelligible, the score resembles scientific graffiti, or the kind of visual rhetoric scrawled on the walls of underground labs in speculative fiction. It offers no safety net of tradition, but instead asks its performer (and its reader) to take the violin into a new dialect, one for which there is no dictionary, only intuition.

This is not a score that documents music. It is a score that performs its own becoming, page by page, medium by unstable medium, ink by sweating chemical. If Chabon were to write its libretto, it would be buried within a footnote to a footnote, trailing off in mid-sentence, replaced by a diagram of something half-remembered and entirely unrepeatable.

“To Maintain a Certain Might” is both relic and prophecy, and the violinist? She is neither interpreter nor servant, but rather the sole surviving speaker of a language invented by shadows.