Composition Of Sound Mixtures With Spectral Maquettes

We present here a system that embeds several composition paradigms and allows a link between the micro-structure of timbre and the macro-shape of musical discourse by imposing temporal relations on signal descriptors. It has also been designed in order to embed symbolic and signal units in a common framework. The system relies on a SQL architecture that acts as an organized lexicon. This database contains symbolic information as well as signal descriptors computed on sounds from several collections. Each descriptor is temporally modelised, allowing to perform queries on the temporal shape. Finally we present the spectral maquettes for OpenMusic (OM), which allow complex temporal and structural interactions between musical units of various nature.