GUIDO music notation
Encyclopedia
GUIDO Music Notation is a computer music notation system designed to logically represent all aspects of music in a format which is both computer
-readable and easily readable by human beings. It was named after Guido of Arezzo
, who pioneered today's conventional musical notation 1,000 years ago.
First designed by Holger H. Hoos
(then at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
, now at University of British Columbia
, Canada
) and Keith Hamel
(University of British Columbia
, Canada
).
Later developments have been done by the SALIERI Project by Holger H. Hoos, Kai Renz and Jürgen F. Kilian.
GUIDO Music Notation has been designed to represent music in a logical format (with the ability to render to sheet music), whereas LilyPond is more narrowly focused on typesetting sheet music.
GUIDO is not primarily focused on conventional music notation, but has been invented as an open format, capable of storing musical, structural, and notational information.
GUIDO Music Notation is designed as a flexible and easily extensible open standard. In particular, its syntax does not restrict the features it can represent. Thus, GUIDO can be easily adapted and customized to cover specialized musical concepts as might be required in the context of research projects in computational musicology. More importantly, GUIDO is designed in a way that when using such custom extensions, the resulting GUIDO data can still be processed by other applications that support GUIDO but are not aware of the custom extensions, which are gracefully ignored. This design also greatly facilitates the incremental implementation of GUIDO support in music software, which can speed up the software development process significantly, especially for research software and prototypes.
GUIDO has been split into three consecutive layers: Basic
GUIDO introduces the main concepts of the GUIDO design and allows to represent much of the conventional music of today. Advanced GUIDO extends Basic GUIDO by adding exact score-formatting and some more advanced musical concepts. Finally, Extended GUIDO can represent user-defined extensions, like microtonal information or user defined pitch classes.
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
-readable and easily readable by human beings. It was named after Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo or Guido Aretinus or Guido da Arezzo or Guido Monaco or Guido d'Arezzo was a music theorist of the Medieval era...
, who pioneered today's conventional musical notation 1,000 years ago.
First designed by Holger H. Hoos
Holger H. Hoos
Holger H. Hoos is a German-Canadian computer scientist and a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia...
(then at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, now at University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
) and Keith Hamel
Keith Hamel
Keith Hamel is a composer, software designer, and professor of music. His music consists of orchestral, chamber, solo, and vocal music, often focussing on live electronics and interactivity between acoustic instruments and computer.-Education:Keith Hamel studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music...
(University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
).
Later developments have been done by the SALIERI Project by Holger H. Hoos, Kai Renz and Jürgen F. Kilian.
GUIDO Music Notation has been designed to represent music in a logical format (with the ability to render to sheet music), whereas LilyPond is more narrowly focused on typesetting sheet music.
- The basic idea behind the GUIDO design is representational adequacy which means that simple musical concepts are represented in a simple way and only complex notions require more complex representations. http://www.salieri.org/guido/about.html
GUIDO is not primarily focused on conventional music notation, but has been invented as an open format, capable of storing musical, structural, and notational information.
GUIDO Music Notation is designed as a flexible and easily extensible open standard. In particular, its syntax does not restrict the features it can represent. Thus, GUIDO can be easily adapted and customized to cover specialized musical concepts as might be required in the context of research projects in computational musicology. More importantly, GUIDO is designed in a way that when using such custom extensions, the resulting GUIDO data can still be processed by other applications that support GUIDO but are not aware of the custom extensions, which are gracefully ignored. This design also greatly facilitates the incremental implementation of GUIDO support in music software, which can speed up the software development process significantly, especially for research software and prototypes.
GUIDO has been split into three consecutive layers: Basic
GUIDO introduces the main concepts of the GUIDO design and allows to represent much of the conventional music of today. Advanced GUIDO extends Basic GUIDO by adding exact score-formatting and some more advanced musical concepts. Finally, Extended GUIDO can represent user-defined extensions, like microtonal information or user defined pitch classes.
External links
- GUIDO Homepage
- GUIDO Noteserver - Renders GUIDO to sheet music online
- Music 253, Stanford University - Classroom introduction and exercises for Guido Music Notation.