John Milton Cage, an influential American composer in the 20th century, did a lot of experimental forms of notation. Part of the attraction of electronic music is to create new noise that is impossible to achieve through conventional instrumentation. To help represent these pitches and rhythmic differences Cage experimented with new forms of notation, mainly graphical.
John Cage was by no means the only artist to experiment with graphical notation, Karlheinz Stockhausen too saw the possibilities availiable with a more open form of notation. Traditional notation allows for only one outcome, Stockhausen wanted to bring interpretation into the performance. In his piece Zyklus he created written music that can be read from any starting point and in any direction, this meant the performance would always be different and dependent not just on the music written down but the performers themselves and their interpretations.
The most basic and common of electronic music notation would be the midi matrix editor, found in as standard in most music creation software. It has a piano roll up the left side to indicate what note is played and the screen is then divided into bars with a note represented as a block. The difference between this and standard notation would be that the lengths of a note can be more precisely calibrated. Inflections such as vibrato and pitch bend can also be added and it is alot more visual than standard notation, the use of colours can affect velocity of a note for example.
A very modern and interesting form of musical notation is the use of graphics to create sound, using spectrogramms where the x axis is time and the y axis is frequency a visual representation of music can be seen. By reversing the process an image can have its corresponding sound, Aphex Twin created such a track on his Window Licker ep where a creepy image of his face shows up when watching the spectrogramm.
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