Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
symbolic music alignment
non-unique alignments
basso continuo
rehearsal repetitions
Match file format
A Flexible Encoding Model for Non-Unique Note Alignments
🤖 AI Summary
Existing symbolic music alignment formats support only one-to-one mappings, making them inadequate for representing complex many-to-many alignment scenarios such as repeated rehearsal passages or figured bass improvisation. This work proposes a lightweight, backward-compatible extension to the Match format that enables flexible encoding of many-to-many alignments within a standard framework by introducing virtual score tokens and pointers to performed notes. Additionally, the “section” directive is enhanced to annotate semantically meaningful segments that transcend explicit score indications. The approach is validated on two representative use cases—piano rehearsal and figured bass realization—demonstrating its capacity to balance expressive power with compatibility in existing alignment systems.
📝 Abstract
Symbolic music alignment links notes in a symbolic performance to their counterparts in a score. While existing alignment encoding formats provide unique correspondences between these notes, there are various musical practices and forms such as practice repetitions in rehearsal and improvised realizations in basso continuo that require a more flexible approach to encoding their alignments. In this paper, we propose a minimal, backward-compatible extension to the Match file format to support such non-unique and semantically complex alignments. We introduce two virtual pointer notes - virtual score notes and virtual performance notes - which allow to encode multiple links between performance and score notes. In addition we expand the Match file's 'section' line to include semantically meaningful annotations of performance regions beyond score-indicated musical repetitions. We further demonstrate the utility of these extensions through two representative use-cases in piano rehearsal and basso continuo.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
non-unique alignment
virtual pointer notes
Match file extension
symbolic music alignment
semantic annotation
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