SONAGRAPH. A CARTOONIFIED SPECTRAL MODEL FOR MUSIC COMPOSITION

This paper presents SonaGraph, a framework and an ap- plication for a simplified but efficient harmonic spectrum analyzer suitable for assisted and algorithmic composition. The model is inspired by the analog Sonagraph and relies on a constant-Q bandpass filter bank. First, the historical Sonagraph is introduced, then, starting from it, a simplified (“cartoonified”) model is discussed. An implementation in SuperCollider is presented that includes various utilities (interactive GUIs, music notation generation, graphic ex- port, data communication). A comparison of results in re- lation to other tools for assisted composition is presented. Finally, some musical examples are discussed, that make use of spectral data from SonaGraph to generate, retrieve and display music information.