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Graphic notation has always been fascinating to me. As an improvising musicianand composer, I tend to think about music and sound in a visual way. In my experi-ence within the free improvisation context, I have found that graphic notation can bea useful tool for guiding the musicians, defining macro-structures but leaving themwith enough freedom to let them express their ideas and personalities. Starting fromthese explorations, I came to the idea to develop a similar system for electronic musiccomposition. We can identify two threads in this thesis. The first focuses on graphicnotation and the definition of a graphic vocabulary for representing musical mate-rial, and how certain aesthetic choices are conveyed by this kind of representation.This topic is covered in chapters 2 and 3, as well as in chapter 5. In particular, chapter2 presents some inspiring sources for the development of the graphic notation andsome previous works of mine on the topic. Chapter 3 describes the graphic notationdeveloped for the system, as well as the musical ideas that I want to express throughthis graphic vocabulary. The second thread is about optical sound and the conceptofraw scanningas opposed tosymbolicrepresentation. Chapter 4 presents a historicalsurvey on optical sound and, more generally, graphic-based systems for synthesiz-ing sound, both in the analogue and in the digital domain. Chapter 5 goes into thedetailed description of the main outcome of this research, an instrument/interfacefor live electronics called CABOTO, which implements both kind of ideas int theform of asymbolic classifierand araw scanner. Chapter 6 presents some final remarksand future developments. The first chapter serves as an introduction.
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