Drawing Electroacoustic Music

The initial stages of creative design often involve sketching. Electroacoustic composition is no exception to this. Paradoxically, the technologies that enable this form of composition provide little support for the sketching process itself. In this paper we first present evidence for the importance of paper-and-pen sketching in current practice and discuss two strategic representational functions it serves: vagueness and ambiguity. Current music programs offer a variety forms of visual representation but offer only limited support for these functions. We discuss the design alternatives that could be used to provide more support for the creative stages of electroacoustic composition. The program Music Sketcher is presented which aims at bridging the gap between the paper-based sketching activity and the final realization of a piece using standard tools.