Music Notation Research Group

Convenor

Professor Cat Hope

Participants

Aaron Wyatt
Louise Devenish
Sam Gillies
David Moran PhD candidate

Flagship ensemble

The Monash Animated Notation Ensemble (MANE) is an ensemble of staff and HDR students that performs music notated via animation, who perform regularly and commission new work. Find out about them here.

Overview

The Music Notation Research Group addresses the tracing of ephemeral art practices through notation. Notations guide performance as well as providing a way to preserve events for comparison, analysis and archiving.

While conventional music notation is optimised for the repeatability of pitch and rhythm, composers since the mid-20th century have invented new notations to highlight other salient performance parameters. Alongside an increased engagement with global music traditions, this led to a plethora of culturally hybrid systems and singular, idiosyncratic, notations. At the same time, the evolution of live analysis software has enabled the notation of music in real-time, enabling new forms of music making guided by situative or generative scores. Digital tools have enabled a range of new ways to create, perform, share and store music notation. The large-scale adoption of such notations and technologies has the capacity to both empower and fundamentally revolutionises the way musicians and audiences conceive of music as a creative art.

The Music Notation Research group is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international network of established and emergent researchers.

Aims

  • Act as a focused forum for technological innovations in music notation.
  • Foster collaborative work and methodological reflection among emerging and established international scholars alike.
  • Investigate and collect new ways of representing music through notation..

Current Projects

  • Together with the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) at the University of Padua, the group is collaborating on new digital notation scores in a project with Prof. Sergio Canazza and Dr Alessandro Fioridelmondo. Members of the group visited Padova in 2025.
  • The group is the oceanic representative on the European Research Council’s ‘Digital Score’ project, a five year, €2 million project commencing in 2021 and led by De Montfort University, which will see Monash staff working with composers and musicians on new technologies for music notation.
  • This research group is part of the International Technologies for Music Notation and Representation Network (TENOR) with universities from around the world.
  • Professor Cat Hope, Aaron Wyatt and Dr Louise Devenish are part of Decibel New Music ensemble, a group of six musicians who focus on the creation, commissioning and performance of innovative notations. They have developed, and continue to update, the Decibel ScorePlayer, a commercially available iPad application for reading and sharing animated notations and shared on the Monash Apple and GooglePlay stores..

Past Projects

  • The release of Cat Hope's Speechless, involving members of the group  (Wyatt as conductor, Devenish as performer) is the first animated notation opera to be recorded and released on CD. It was released in 2025 on Swiss label Hat Hat.
  • Flagship MANE visit the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, Germany in 2022 for a  week long research residency, including concert performances.
  • Decibel new music toured the UK in December 2022, engaging a range of universities in showcases for the Decibel ScorePlayer and Australian artists working with animated notation.
  • The Notation research group was part of the TENOR Network, funded by the Canadian SHRC between 2015 and 2018, with University partners worldwide.