Music Languages

A language can be defined as a communication framework that defines a particular syntax, grammar and vocabulary. According to this definition, many of the environments presented until now could be classified as music languages. As a matter of fact, the previous section includes music graphical programming languages.

In this section though, we use the term music language in a restrictive manner, to define the category of music environments (or languages) that do not offer a graphical environment or do not qualify for being software frameworks.

We have separated this category of environments into two subcategories: Music-N Languages and Score Languages. In the first category we will present languages that somehow respond to the Music-N paradigm as presented by Max Mathews [Mathews, 1969]. The second one includes languages with a narrower scope as they only provide constructs for specifying music scores.