Melodic Photography

This work is situated in the area of Computer-Assisted Composition, CAC. More specifically, in the generation of pre-compositional material at a symbolic level. Our use and appropriation of this technological resource was, however, influenced by the philosophy of Vilem Flusser, especially his work Black Box Philosophy. The aims of this research were both to contribute (via Flusser) to the debate on the current compositional environment, and to use the computational resource that is notably characteristic of this environment to solve a problem of organizing pitches and ordering musical events. The treatment given to pitch space in post-tonal music favors, in its generality and abstraction, more analytical than practical approaches. In this way, we introduced the concept of the Table of Interval Differences, TDI, as a photograph of the interval relationships in a temporal sequence that incorporates both intervals between successive events and intervals between non-adjacent events, in a way taking up a proposal by Ernest Ansermet (1987).