When musicians make music, it is not a simple matter of only constructing something from a whim or calculated experiment, but mostly a desire to communicate something to others. One of the primary ways we communicate musical ideas to other musicians is through a score, and as more of us explore technology, the nature and understanding of a score is shifting. The next evolutionary stage of scores – what I am calling a digital score – is now more likely to be animated, full of colour, shapes and symbols, gamified, networked, and adapting the communicative potential of multiple senses. Many digital scores are generative, evolving as the performance does, it might be agential, perhaps even intelligent and making it up on the spot. These digital scores inspire new senses of togetherness and emergence, freedom and agency and can be inclusive, breaking down barriers of access to music-making. Critically they can form new types of relationships, connections and bonds that lead to new processes of meaning-making. But how do we understand these new meaning-making bonds in digital scores? Do we really know what we are doing? In this talk I will present findings from the 5-year ERC funded Digital Score project (2021-26), that examined meaning-making processes in digital scores. I will overview the project and the international case studies, and dive into explaining the principles of ‘digital musicking’. Following this I will outline the PACMMAN framework that was developed to identify meaning-making attributes across a range of digital scores. Finally, I share 3 projects that I believe highlight the potential positive and transformational encounters brought about by the Digital Score project.
Craig Vear
Craig Vear is Professor of Music and Computer Science at the University of Nottingham split between music and the mixed reality lab. His research is naturally hybrid as he draws together the fields of music, digital performance, creative technologies, Artificial Intelligence, creativity, gaming, mixed reality and robotics. He has been engaged in practice-based research with emerging technologies for nearly three decades, and was editor for The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research, published in 2022. His recent monograph The Digital Score: creativity, musicianship and innovation, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he is Series Editor of Springer’s Cultural Computing Series. In 2021 he was awarded a €2Million ERC Consolidator Grant to continue to develop his Digital Score research.
