Francesco Vitucci, Michele Lorusso, Francesco Scagliolacs.CL
One algorithmic composition may require a Csound score, engraved notation, real-time control, and a rehearsal click. Authored separately, their timelines drift. Temporal System is a Wolfram Language paclet that instead compiles one immutable store of typed entities on a rational beat timeline through backend-specific contracts. It emits Csound synthesis, beta MusicXML 4.0, OSC control, and click artifacts that remain synchronized because they share that store. Conversion to seconds, samples, or hertz occurs only at render time. Csound notes use stable named instruments in external .orc files; curves become k-rate signals declared against score p-fields. The click backend derives rehearsal audio from the same meter and tempo and reuses the Csound serializer. We describe the temporal, semantic, and rendering-contract layers, their practical trade-offs, and the limits of this proprietary authoring environment within an otherwise open-source ecosystem. The archived supplement exposes the reported outputs pending paclet release.
Current work in modeling symbolic music primarily relies on representations extracted from MIDI-like data. While such formats allow for modeling symbolic music as sequences of notes, they omit the large space of symbolic annotations common in western sheet music broadly known as expression text, such as tempo or dynamics, which specify time- and velocity-dependent controls on the musical composition and performance. To alleviate this gap, we present MusPyExpress, an extension to the popular symbolic music processing library MusPy that enables the extraction of expression text along with symbolic music for downstream modeling. Utilizing this extension, we parse the PDMX dataset to illustrate the wealth of expression text available in MusicXML datasets. Additionally, we introduce multiple generative tasks, including joint expression-note generation, expression-conditioned music generation, and expression tagging, that take advantage of this additional notational information.