Virtualization of real time audio processes : towards a musical notation of contemporary music.

Contemporary musical production makes an heavy usage of digital artefacts, either hardware or software based. Since the middle of the 80es, an important issue has been recognized: the fast obsolescence of hardware and software products endanger seriously the future of this production. The question is not only to preserve the results, by recording them, but to preserve the ability to reperform the works live, as we do today for music of the last centuries. We will present the methodology we develop in the ASTREE project for building knowledge in relation to musical works, and particularly for digital processes that are considered as specific music instruments. We will discuss the different issues in preservation of contemporary music, and show that one of the most prominent is the lack of formalized knowledge about the digital musical instruments, their notation, and their integration into musical score. We will present our efforts towards building an organology of real-time audio processes, and show that this can be the basis for an adequate musical notation and its integration in musical score.