Introduction to RUBATO: The Music Software for Statistical Analysis

Abstract

RUBATO^® is a metamachine designed for representation, analysis, and performance of music. It was developed on the NEXTSTEP environment during two SNSF grants from 1992 to 1996 by the author and Oliver Zahorka (SNSF Research Reports. Universität Zürich, 1993–1995; Proceedings of the ICMC 94. ICMA, 1994), Mazzola et al. (Computing in Musicology. CCARH, 1995b; The RUBATO homepage. Univ. Zürich, 1996), Zahorka (Animato 97(3): 9–10, 1997a; Symposionsband Klangart ’95. Schott, 1997b). From 1998 to 2001, the software was ported to Mac OS X by Jörg Garbers in a grant of the Volkswagen Foundation. RUBATO^®’s architecture is that of a frame application which admits loading of an arbitrary number of modules at run-time. Such a module is called RUBETTE^®. There are very different types of Rubettes. On the one hand, they may be designed for primavista, compositional, analytical, performance stemma, or logical and geometric predication tasks. On the other, they are designed for subsidiary tasks, such as filtering from and to databases, information representation, and navigation tasks, or else for more specific subtasks for larger “macro” Rubettes. A RUBETTE^® of the subtask type is coined OPERATOR and implements, for example, what we have called performance operators in section [Mazzola et al. (The Topos of Music. Birkhäuser, 2002, 44.7)]. The RUBATO^® concept also includes distributed operability among different peers. This software is conceived as a musicological research platform and not a hard-coded device; we describe this approach. Concluding this chapter, we discuss the relation between frame and modules.