The study of bowing is critically important for string players.  Traditional bowing annotations are a valuable part of orchestral and individual documentation, but they do not help the performer to search a piece for other passages that should be bowed the same way, or to identify alternative bowing styles.  We introduce a notation based on regular expressions that describes patterns of notes in the music, as well as the bowing to be applied to the pattern.  These expressions support complex bowings, and not just single annotations without musical context.  The notation is simpler than general tools for regular expressions used in some software, and is suitable for use by students and musicians.  We have developed a music editor that implements the notation and edits documents in Lilypond.  The approach has been evaluated by experimenting with the editor on six violin sonatas by Mozart.  The experiments demonstrate that the regular expression notation

is successful at finding passages and inserting the bowings; that the patterns occur a number of times; and the bowings can be inserted automatically and consistently

Hall, C.V.

O'Donnell, J.T.

English

Enlighten

      Hall, Cordelia V. and O'Donnell, John T. (2009) Using Regular Expressions to Express Bowing Patterns for String Players. In: International Conference on Music and Computers, August 2009, Montreal.     http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/43725/       Deposited on: 10 November 2010   Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk USING REGULAR EXPRESSIONS TO EXPRESS BOWING PATTERNS FORSTRING PLAYERSCordelia V. Hall, John T. O’DonnellUniversity of GlasgowDepartment of Computing Science, Glasgow, UKjtod@dcs.gla.ac.ukABSTRACTThe study of bowing is critically important for string play-ers. Traditional bowing annotations are a valuable part oforchestral and individual documentation, but they do nothelp the performer to search a piece for other passages thatshould be bowed the same way, or to identify alternativebowing styles. We introduce a notation based on regularexpressions that describes patterns of notes in the music,as well as the bowing to be applied to the pattern. Theseexpressions support complex bowings, and not just singleannotations without musical context. The notation is sim-pler than general tools for regular expressions used in somesoftware, and is suitable for use by students and musicians.We have developed a music editor that implements the no-tation and edits documents in Lilypond. The approach hasbeen evaluated by experimenting with the editor on six vio-lin sonatas by Mozart. The experiments demonstrate that theregular expression notation is successful at finding passagesand inserting the bowings; that the patterns occur a numberof times; and the bowings can be inserted automatically andconsistently.1. INTRODUCTIONCreating bowings for string instruments takes hard work. Itrequires technical maturity and experience from the stringplayer, so much so that when learning their instrument, manystudents are given bowings by their teachers and expected towork out their own later. This implies that there is a collec-tion of bowings appearing in music commonly studied, butone that cannot be searched and consulted. It is likely thatthere is little in the way of archiving done for bowings devel-oped by professionals either, yet their experience is worth agreat deal as well.In an information age, this is a sad state of affairs. Itis not helped by the fact that many editors accept bowingnotation, but then do not currently support search or otheralgorithms, so that the string player can represent but notreally exploit bowing information.We have been doing some experiments towards an editorthat supports string players when learning chamber and or-chestral music. The user can search for and possibly changebowings similar to a given one specified in one of the parts,and can look up what was done in well known editions.To do this, we want to describe precisely a sequence orpattern of notes that will be bowed in a certain way. Theentire piece (or even other pieces of music) can then besearched for occurrences of this pattern. There needs to bea precise notation for expressing such sequences, becausecomputer algorithms will perform the search, and we alsowant it to be unambiguous and clear for a musician. Thesearch will find a set of matches—places where the actualmusic fits the pattern.We also want to insert a bowing into each occurrenceof a match in a piece of music. Musicians often prefer tobow similar passages in a similar way, and it may also benecessary to edit the parts for different string sections in anensemble so that they are using compatible bowings.A further goal is to provide a notation that can be used toarchive and search editions of music, including the bowings.The current situation is that bowings are inserted as graphicsymbols in music notation, which is useful for the performerbut does not support automated searches.The bowing patterns must express the essential aspectsof a passage (such as note durations) while omitting irrele-vant aspects. A bowing pattern will apply to a sequence ofnotes, so the pattern must be able to express concatenation.Sometimes bowing patterns start or end in slightly differentways in various places; this means that the notation mustbe able to express a choice between alternatives. A regularbowing may occur several times within a passage, and it iseven possible for the number of repetitions to vary in sev-eral places within the music. Therefore the notation mustexpress a repetition of a smaller pattern.The requirements discussed above are met by regular ex-pressions, a mathematical technique developed to describelanguages formally. Regular expressions can be used bothto match music passages and to edit them.2. REGULAR EXPRESSIONS AND BOWINGPATTERNSA regular expression takes a set of symbols and builds alter-nations, repetitions, and concatenations from them and otherregular expressions.The set of symbols we use for notes is be derived froma set of numbers giving note durations {1,2,4,8,16,32}.Dots can be added as needed to these durations to expressdotted durations as well. We then add bowing directionsfrom {u,d} to elements of the set of note durations, formingthe set of note representations {1u,1d,1.u, ...,2u,2d, ...}. Wealso need a set of articulation symbols. There are articula-tion symbols such as 〈 and 〉, which denote articulation slurs,( and ) which are ordinary slurs, ‘′’, which denotes a stac-cato mark, and ‘-’, which denotes a legato mark. Finally,there is ‘*’, which denotes an empty string, and is used toindicate a point at which a symbol will be inserted during anedit. The full set of symbols is:{1u,1d,2u,2d,4u,4d,8u,8d,16u,16d32u,32d, ...,〈,〉,(,),′ ,−,∗}All of the elements of this set, except for ‘*’, match onlythemselves, while the ‘*’ matches the empty string.A bowing pattern is either• a concatenation, written as p1 p2 where p1 and p2are symbols and/or bowing patterns,• an alternation, written as {p1 | p2}, where p1 and p2are symbols and/or bowing patterns,• or a repetition, written as [p], where p is either a sym-bol or a bowing pattern.For example, the concatenation 16u 8d represents a semi-quaver upbow followed by a quaver downbow; the alterna-tion {16u | 8d} represents either a semiquaver upbow or aquaver downbow, and the repetition [8d] represents a se-quence of quaver downbows.3. USING BOWING PATTERNS TO EDIT MUSICOur software allows the user to see a Lilypond file, edit it,and then look at the typeset. Lilypond is a text-based musicnotation language, so it can provide some of the benefits ofboth text and graphics. It generates an excellent score, andbecause it is text-based, an editor can provide searching andother algorithms to a user. A hybrid of this form offers agreat deal to a string player who wants to edit music in anappropriate form, but would also like to be able to consultbowings of other experts, or look at and edit other parts inchamber music.Figure 1 shows the results of an experiment using theeditor, applying Schradieck’s bowings to several movementsfrom Mozart’s piano and violin sonatas. Notice that the editsin these cases occur at least twice and some cases as manyas 7 times. That means that the editor saved time and madeconsistent edits on multiple instances of the bowings. In ad-dition, these search and edit patterns may be saved, allowingthe user to search for them in other editions of the same mu-sic and research their own bowing decisions.As an example of how the bowing patterns work, welook at the second bowing inserted on the first line of Figure2 (at the end of this paper). The annotated music has a dot-ted crochet (C) followed by a quaver (G) and four quaversfollowing (B,A,G,F).The bowing pattern used to insert this bowing is {2d |(4.d 8d)} ∗ 8u 8d 8u 8d∗. Because the pattern occurs else-where in the piece with a different initial note, it starts withan alternation, in which the second arm matches the dottedcrochet (C) and quaver (G). The quavers afterwards, whichmatch B,A,G,F, are surrounded by ‘*’, indicating that newbowing symbols will be inserted there.The bowing pattern used to edit this bowing is {2d |(4.d 8d)}(8u 8u 8u 8u). Notice that while nothing is differ-ent about the initial alternation, the ‘*’s have been replacedwith parentheses, indicating that they are slurred, and all ofthe last four quavers are upbows.Like this pattern, most of the matching bowing patternsare simple concatenations with alternations. However, repe-titions had an interesting role to play too. In KV 301, move-ment 2, the matching bowing pattern has a repetition, withinwhich there is a concatenation followed by an alternation.When matching, it suggests a while loop in which the con-catenation within the repeat is matched several times, fol-lowed by one of the alternatives of the alternation. Whenthe concatenation is matched for the last time, the other al-ternative of the alternation is matched and the match of thebowing pattern succeeds. Similarly, in KV 304, movement1, the matching pattern is a concatenation, followed by arepetition, followed by a concatenation. The repetition cap-tures the repeated figure in the theme of the movement.4. RESEARCH CONTEXTIndividual violin bow strokes have been studied from audiodata and catalogued in databases [5] [7]. It has also beenrecognised that the annotations produced by musicians asthey work are essential to their profession [6], and so bow-ing annotations have been supported in digital music standssuch as muse [2] and eStand [1], although searching forbowing annotations appears not to be supported as yet.Humdrum [3] supports accessing representations of mu-sic with regular expressions, although these systems are thoughtto be of use to music researchers only.Our work also uses regular expressions to address a prac-tical problem for for students and performing musicians. Itenhances a music editor with the capability of searching forsearch edit loc{2d | (2.d 4d)} {2d | (2.d 4d)} 296,3∗(16u 8.u) 〈(16u 8.u) 7(16d 8.d) (16d 8.d){(16u 8.u)∗ | ∗} {(16u 8.u)〉|〉}{2d | (4.d 8d)} {2d | (4.d 8d)} 296,3∗8u 8d 8u 8d∗ (8u 8u 8u 8u) 58d ∗∗16u 16d 8d′ (16u 16u 301,18u∗∗16d 16u 8u)(16d 16d 6{4d∗ | 8d∗} {4d) | 8d)}∗4.d 16u 16d∗ (4.d 16d 16d) 301,1∗8u∗8d ∗∗ (8u′ 8u′) 2∗16u 16d 16u 16d∗ (16d 16d 16d 16d)∗4.u 16d 16u∗ (4.u 16u 16u)8d 8u 8d 8u[8d ∗8u∗8d ∗∗ [8d (8u′ 8u′) 301,2(8u 8u) (8d 8d) 2{∗16d 16u∗ {(16u 16u)| 8d}] | 8d}]16u 16d 16u 16d 16u 16d 16u 16d 302,216u 16d 16u 16u 16d 16u 5(16d 16d) (16d 16d)∗16u∗16d ∗∗ (16u′ 16u′)(16u 16u) (16d 16d)∗16d ∗16u∗∗ (16u′ 16u′)4d 8u∗8d∗ 4d 8u−8d− 302,2(8u 8u 8u 8u) (8u 8u 8u 8u) 4{(4.d 16d 16d) {(4.d 16d 16d) 303,2∗8u∗8d ∗∗ (8u′ 8u′) 5| (4.u 16u 16u) | (4.d 16d 16d)∗8d ∗8u∗∗} (8u′ 8u′)}8d 8u 2d 2u 8d 8u 2d 2u 304,12.d 8u 8d 2.d 8u 8d 4[∗∗2u 4d ∗4u∗ [〈(2u 4u) 4u′∗2.d 8u 8d] 〉2.d 8u 8d]4u 4d 4u 4d∗4u∗4d ∗∗ (4u′ 4u′)(8.d 32d 32d∗ (8.d 32d 32d) 306,2∗8.d 32d 32d∗ (8.u 32u 32u) 2∗8.d 32d 32d) (8.d 32d 32d)Figure 1. Bowing patterns inserted by the editor. Wetranslated six movements from Mozart’s piano and violinsonatas into Lilypond, and looked at an edition bowed bySchradieck for information on bowings to be changed andinserted. For each of the bowing patterns in the column la-belled search, we used the editor to insert the correspond-ing edit pattern on the same line. The loc column gives theKo¨chel number, movement number, and, on the next line,the number of occurrences of an edit.and modifying complex bowing patterns, not just individ-ual annotations without context. We provide two levels ofnotation: one which is suited to the performer (the notationthat appears in Figure 1), and a more complex underlyingnotation needed by the software to interact with Lilypondnotation.5. CONCLUSIONWe have developed a music editor that implements simpleregular expression notation and edits documents in Lily-pond. The approach has been evaluated by experimentingwith the editor on six violin sonatas by Mozart. The ex-periments demonstrate that the regular expression notationis successful at finding passages and inserting the bowings.They also show that the patterns occur a number of times,and the bowings can be inserted automatically and consis-tently (thus the use of patterns is justified).Students may benefit particularly from this approach, asit supports the systematic study and comparison of bowingsin various editions edited by well known musicians.While Lilypond is well suited to the problem of express-ing bowing patterns, being text based, there is no reason inprinciple that other text based or even WYSIWYG editorscannot make bowing patterns available to users.6. REFERENCES[1] J. Cross, “estand(tm) electronic music stand,” in Notes,March 2004.[2] C. Graefe, D. Wahila, J. Maguire, and O. Dasna, “muse:a digital music stand for symphony musicians,” in ACMinteractions, Vol. 3, Issue 3, May/June 1996, pp. 26–35.[3] D. Huron, “The humdrum toolkit reference manual,” inCenter for Computer Assisted Research in the Humani-ties, 1994, pp. 1–551.[4] W. Mozart, Eighteen Sonatas For Piano and Violin,H. Schradieck, Ed. G. Schirmer, 1934.[5] N. Rasamimanana, E. Flety, and F. Bevilacqua, “Ges-ture analysis of violin bow strokes,” in 6th InternationalGesture Workshop, 2005, pp. 145–155.[6] M. Winget, “Heroic frogs save the bow: Perform-ing musician’s annotation and interaction behavior withwritten music,” in 7th International Conference on Mu-sic Information Retrieval, 2006.[7] D. Young and A. Deshmane, “Bowstroke database:A web-accessible archive of violin bowing data’,” inNIME, 2007. noteheads dotsnoteheads restsrestsrests noteheads noteheadsdotsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads11 timesigclefs restsnoteheads restsnoteheads noteheadsflagsdots scriptsnoteheadsnoteheads rests296,3,anoteheadsflagsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheads flagsdotsdotsdotsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsdotsnoteheadsflags noteheadsnoteheadsflagsnoteheads11 timesigclefs restsnoteheads restsrestsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsdotsnoteheads noteheadsdots296,3,bnoteheads restsrestsdots noteheadsdotsnoteheadsflagsnoteheadsnoteheadsdotsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsrestsdotsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads40 timesigaccidentalsclefs flagsnoteheadsaccidentalsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads301,1,arests flagsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsaccidentals noteheads noteheadsaccidentalsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads noteheads noteheads noteheads42clefs accidentals noteheadsaccidentals noteheads noteheads restsnoteheadsaccidentals noteheads noteheadsnoteheads noteheadsscripts dots noteheads noteheads noteheads noteheads dots noteheadsnoteheads noteheadsaccidentalsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsflags noteheadsflagsclefsaccidentals timesig40 accidentalsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheads301,1,brests noteheads noteheads noteheadsnoteheadsaccidentals noteheadsaccidentalsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads noteheads noteheads noteheads42clefs accidentals noteheadsaccidentals noteheads noteheads restsnoteheadsaccidentals noteheadsscripts noteheadsscriptsnoteheads noteheadsscripts dots noteheads accidentals noteheads noteheads noteheads dots noteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsaccidentals1683accidentalsclefs flagsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsrestsflags301,2,anoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsscriptsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsaccidentals1683accidentalsclefs flagsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheads noteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheadsrestsflags301,2,bnoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheads scriptsnoteheads noteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadstimesigaccidentalsclefs noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsrests304,1,arests noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads accidentalsnoteheadsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadstimesigaccidentalsclefs scriptsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads scriptsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsrests304,1,brests noteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsscriptsnoteheadsnoteheads dotsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheadsnoteheads noteheadsaccidentalsMusic engraving by LilyPond 2.10.33—www.lilypond.orgFigure 2. Part of the Lilypond output generated by the editor for the pieces referred to in Figure 1. The versions labelled ’a’are the original Mozart; the versions labelled ’b’ are generated by the editor using the bowings of Schradieck [4].

Using regular expressions to express bowing patterns for string players

Enlighten: Publications

 
 
 
 
 
 
Hall, Cordelia V. and O'Donnell, John T. (2009) Using Regular Expressions 
to Express Bowing Patterns for String Players. In: International Conference 
on Music and Computers, August 2009, Montreal. 
 
 
 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/43725/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Deposited on: 10 November 2010 
 
 
Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
USING REGULAR EXPRESSIONS TO EXPRESS BOWING PATTERNS FOR
STRING PLAYERS
Cordelia V. Hall, John T. O’Donnell
University of Glasgow
Department of Computing Science, Glasgow, UK
jtod@dcs.gla.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
The study of bowing is critically important for string play-
ers. Traditional bowing annotations are a valuable part of
orchestral and individual documentation, but they do not
help the performer to search a piece for other passages that
should be bowed the same way, or to identify alternative
bowing styles. We introduce a notation based on regular
expressions that describes patterns of notes in the music,
as well as the bowing to be applied to the pattern. These
expressions support complex bowings, and not just single
annotations without musical context. The notation is sim-
pler than general tools for regular expressions used in some
software, and is suitable for use by students and musicians.
We have developed a music editor that implements the no-
tation and edits documents in Lilypond. The approach has
been evaluated by experimenting with the editor on six vio-
lin sonatas by Mozart. The experiments demonstrate that the
regular expression notation is successful at finding passages
and inserting the bowings; that the patterns occur a number
of times; and the bowings can be inserted automatically and
consistently.
1. INTRODUCTION
Creating bowings for string instruments takes hard work. It
requires technical maturity and experience from the string
player, so much so that when learning their instrument, many
students are given bowings by their teachers and expected to
work out their own later. This implies that there is a collec-
tion of bowings appearing in music commonly studied, but
one that cannot be searched and consulted. It is likely that
there is little in the way of archiving done for bowings devel-
oped by professionals either, yet their experience is worth a
great deal as well.
In an information age, this is a sad state of affairs. It
is not helped by the fact that many editors accept bowing
notation, but then do not currently support search or other
algorithms, so that the string player can represent but not
really exploit bowing information.
We have been doing some experiments towards an editor
that supports string players when learning chamber and or-
chestral music. The user can search for and possibly change
bowings similar to a given one specified in one of the parts,
and can look up what was done in well known editions.
To do this, we want to describe precisely a sequence or
pattern of notes that will be bowed in a certain way. The
entire piece (or even other pieces of music) can then be
searched for occurrences of this pattern. There needs to be
a precise notation for expressing such sequences, because
computer algorithms will perform the search, and we also
want it to be unambiguous and clear for a musician. The
search will find a set of matches—places where the actual
music fits the pattern.
We also want to insert a bowing into each occurrence
of a match in a piece of music. Musicians often prefer to
bow similar passages in a similar way, and it may also be
necessary to edit the parts for different string sections in an
ensemble so that they are using compatible bowings.
A further goal is to provide a notation that can be used to
archive and search editions of music, including the bowings.
The current situation is that bowings are inserted as graphic
symbols in music notation, which is useful for the performer
but does not support automated searches.
The bowing patterns must express the essential aspects
of a passage (such as note durations) while omitting irrele-
vant aspects. A bowing pattern will apply to a sequence of
notes, so the pattern must be able to express concatenation.
Sometimes bowing patterns start or end in slightly different
ways in various places; this means that the notation must
be able to express a choice between alternatives. A regular
bowing may occur several times within a passage, and it is
even possible for the number of repetitions to vary in sev-
eral places within the music. Therefore the notation must
express a repetition of a smaller pattern.
The requirements discussed above are met by regular ex-
pressions, a mathematical technique developed to describe
languages formally. Regular expressions can be used both
to match music passages and to edit them.
2. REGULAR EXPRESSIONS AND BOWING
PATTERNS
A regular expression takes a set of symbols and builds alter-
nations, repetitions, and concatenations from them and other
regular expressions.
The set of symbols we use for notes is be derived from
a set of numbers giving note durations {1,2,4,8,16,32}.
Dots can be added as needed to these durations to express
dotted durations as well. We then add bowing directions
from {u,d} to elements of the set of note durations, forming
the set of note representations {1u,1d,1.u, ...,2u,2d, ...}. We
also need a set of articulation symbols. There are articula-
tion symbols such as 〈 and 〉, which denote articulation slurs,
( and ) which are ordinary slurs, ‘′’, which denotes a stac-
cato mark, and ‘-’, which denotes a legato mark. Finally,
there is ‘*’, which denotes an empty string, and is used to
indicate a point at which a symbol will be inserted during an
edit. The full set of symbols is:
{1u,1d,2u,2d,4u,4d,8u,8d,16u,16d
32u,32d, ...,〈,〉,(,),′ ,−,∗}
All of the elements of this set, except for ‘*’, match only
themselves, while the ‘*’ matches the empty string.
A bowing pattern is either
• a concatenation, written as p1 p2 where p1 and p2
are symbols and/or bowing patterns,
• an alternation, written as {p1 | p2}, where p1 and p2
are symbols and/or bowing patterns,
• or a repetition, written as [p], where p is either a sym-
bol or a bowing pattern.
For example, the concatenation 16u 8d represents a semi-
quaver upbow followed by a quaver downbow; the alterna-
tion {16u | 8d} represents either a semiquaver upbow or a
quaver downbow, and the repetition [8d] represents a se-
quence of quaver downbows.
3. USING BOWING PATTERNS TO EDIT MUSIC
Our software allows the user to see a Lilypond file, edit it,
and then look at the typeset. Lilypond is a text-based music
notation language, so it can provide some of the benefits of
both text and graphics. It generates an excellent score, and
because it is text-based, an editor can provide searching and
other algorithms to a user. A hybrid of this form offers a
great deal to a string player who wants to edit music in an
appropriate form, but would also like to be able to consult
bowings of other experts, or look at and edit other parts in
chamber music.
Figure 1 shows the results of an experiment using the
editor, applying Schradieck’s bowings to several movements
from Mozart’s piano and violin sonatas. Notice that the edits
in these cases occur at least twice and some cases as many
as 7 times. That means that the editor saved time and made
consistent edits on multiple instances of the bowings. In ad-
dition, these search and edit patterns may be saved, allowing
the user to search for them in other editions of the same mu-
sic and research their own bowing decisions.
As an example of how the bowing patterns work, we
look at the second bowing inserted on the first line of Figure
2 (at the end of this paper). The annotated music has a dot-
ted crochet (C) followed by a quaver (G) and four quavers
following (B,A,G,F).
The bowing pattern used to insert this bowing is {2d |
(4.d 8d)} ∗ 8u 8d 8u 8d∗. Because the pattern occurs else-
where in the piece with a different initial note, it starts with
an alternation, in which the second arm matches the dotted
crochet (C) and quaver (G). The quavers afterwards, which
match B,A,G,F, are surrounded by ‘*’, indicating that new
bowing symbols will be inserted there.
The bowing pattern used to edit this bowing is {2d |
(4.d 8d)}(8u 8u 8u 8u). Notice that while nothing is differ-
ent about the initial alternation, the ‘*’s have been replaced
with parentheses, indicating that they are slurred, and all of
the last four quavers are upbows.
Like this pattern, most of the matching bowing patterns
are simple concatenations with alternations. However, repe-
titions had an interesting role to play too. In KV 301, move-
ment 2, the matching bowing pattern has a repetition, within
which there is a concatenation followed by an alternation.
When matching, it suggests a while loop in which the con-
catenation within the repeat is matched several times, fol-
lowed by one of the alternatives of the alternation. When
the concatenation is matched for the last time, the other al-
ternative of the alternation is matched and the match of the
bowing pattern succeeds. Similarly, in KV 304, movement
1, the matching pattern is a concatenation, followed by a
repetition, followed by a concatenation. The repetition cap-
tures the repeated figure in the theme of the movement.
4. RESEARCH CONTEXT
Individual violin bow strokes have been studied from audio
data and catalogued in databases [5] [7]. It has also been
recognised that the annotations produced by musicians as
they work are essential to their profession [6], and so bow-
ing annotations have been supported in digital music stands
such as muse [2] and eStand [1], although searching for
bowing annotations appears not to be supported as yet.
Humdrum [3] supports accessing representations of mu-
sic with regular expressions, although these systems are thought
to be of use to music researchers only.
Our work also uses regular expressions to address a prac-
tical problem for for students and performing musicians. It
enhances a music editor with the capability of searching for
search edit loc
{2d | (2.d 4d)} {2d | (2.d 4d)} 296,3
∗(16u 8.u) 〈(16u 8.u) 7
(16d 8.d) (16d 8.d)
{(16u 8.u)∗ | ∗} {(16u 8.u)〉|〉}
{2d | (4.d 8d)} {2d | (4.d 8d)} 296,3
∗8u 8d 8u 8d∗ (8u 8u 8u 8u) 5
8d ∗∗16u 16d 8d′ (16u 16u 301,1
8u∗∗16d 16u 8u)(16d 16d 6
{4d∗ | 8d∗} {4d) | 8d)}
∗4.d 16u 16d∗ (4.d 16d 16d) 301,1
∗8u∗8d ∗∗ (8u′ 8u′) 2
∗16u 16d 16u 16d∗ (16d 16d 16d 16d)
∗4.u 16d 16u∗ (4.u 16u 16u)
8d 8u 8d 8u
[8d ∗8u∗8d ∗∗ [8d (8u′ 8u′) 301,2
(8u 8u) (8d 8d) 2
{∗16d 16u∗ {(16u 16u)
| 8d}] | 8d}]
16u 16d 16u 16d 16u 16d 16u 16d 302,2
16u 16d 16u 16u 16d 16u 5
(16d 16d) (16d 16d)
∗16u∗16d ∗∗ (16u′ 16u′)
(16u 16u) (16d 16d)
∗16d ∗16u∗∗ (16u′ 16u′)
4d 8u∗8d∗ 4d 8u−8d− 302,2
(8u 8u 8u 8u) (8u 8u 8u 8u) 4
{(4.d 16d 16d) {(4.d 16d 16d) 303,2
∗8u∗8d ∗∗ (8u′ 8u′) 5
| (4.u 16u 16u) | (4.d 16d 16d)
∗8d ∗8u∗∗} (8u′ 8u′)}
8d 8u 2d 2u 8d 8u 2d 2u 304,1
2.d 8u 8d 2.d 8u 8d 4
[∗∗2u 4d ∗4u∗ [〈(2u 4u) 4u′
∗2.d 8u 8d] 〉2.d 8u 8d]
4u 4d 4u 4d
∗4u∗4d ∗∗ (4u′ 4u′)
(8.d 32d 32d∗ (8.d 32d 32d) 306,2
∗8.d 32d 32d∗ (8.u 32u 32u) 2
∗8.d 32d 32d) (8.d 32d 32d)
Figure 1. Bowing patterns inserted by the editor. We
translated six movements from Mozart’s piano and violin
sonatas into Lilypond, and looked at an edition bowed by
Schradieck for information on bowings to be changed and
inserted. For each of the bowing patterns in the column la-
belled search, we used the editor to insert the correspond-
ing edit pattern on the same line. The loc column gives the
Ko¨chel number, movement number, and, on the next line,
the number of occurrences of an edit.
and modifying complex bowing patterns, not just individ-
ual annotations without context. We provide two levels of
notation: one which is suited to the performer (the notation
that appears in Figure 1), and a more complex underlying
notation needed by the software to interact with Lilypond
notation.
5. CONCLUSION
We have developed a music editor that implements simple
regular expression notation and edits documents in Lily-
pond. The approach has been evaluated by experimenting
with the editor on six violin sonatas by Mozart. The ex-
periments demonstrate that the regular expression notation
is successful at finding passages and inserting the bowings.
They also show that the patterns occur a number of times,
and the bowings can be inserted automatically and consis-
tently (thus the use of patterns is justified).
Students may benefit particularly from this approach, as
it supports the systematic study and comparison of bowings
in various editions edited by well known musicians.
While Lilypond is well suited to the problem of express-
ing bowing patterns, being text based, there is no reason in
principle that other text based or even WYSIWYG editors
cannot make bowing patterns available to users.
6. REFERENCES
[1] J. Cross, “estand(tm) electronic music stand,” in Notes,
March 2004.
[2] C. Graefe, D. Wahila, J. Maguire, and O. Dasna, “muse:
a digital music stand for symphony musicians,” in ACM
interactions, Vol. 3, Issue 3, May/June 1996, pp. 26–35.
[3] D. Huron, “The humdrum toolkit reference manual,” in
Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humani-
ties, 1994, pp. 1–551.
[4] W. Mozart, Eighteen Sonatas For Piano and Violin,
H. Schradieck, Ed. G. Schirmer, 1934.
[5] N. Rasamimanana, E. Flety, and F. Bevilacqua, “Ges-
ture analysis of violin bow strokes,” in 6th International
Gesture Workshop, 2005, pp. 145–155.
[6] M. Winget, “Heroic frogs save the bow: Perform-
ing musician’s annotation and interaction behavior with
written music,” in 7th International Conference on Mu-
sic Information Retrieval, 2006.
[7] D. Young and A. Deshmane, “Bowstroke database:
A web-accessible archive of violin bowing data’,” in
NIME, 2007.
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Music engraving by LilyPond 2.10.33—www.lilypond.org
Figure 2. Part of the Lilypond output generated by the editor for the pieces referred to in Figure 1. The versions labelled ’a’
are the original Mozart; the versions labelled ’b’ are generated by the editor using the bowings of Schradieck [4].


Using regular expressions to express bowing patterns for string players

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