Architecture

RUBATO® is a metamachine designed for representation, analysis, and performance of music. It was developed on the NEXTSTEP environment during two SNSF grants from 1992 to 1996 by the author and Oliver Zahorka [690, 689, 692, 699, 1146, 1148]. From 1998 to 2001, the software was ported to Mac OS X by Jöorg Garbers in a grant of the Volkswagen Foundation. RUBATO®’s architecture is that of a frame application which admits loading of an arbitrary number of modules at run-time. Such a module is called RUBETTE®. There are very di_erent types of Rubettes. On the one hand, they may be designed for primavista, compositional, analytical, performance stemma or logical and geometric predication tasks. On the other, they are designed for subsidiary tasks, such as filtering from and to databases, information representation and navigation tasks, or else for more speci_c subtasks for larger “macro” Rubettes. A RUBETTE® of the subtask type is coined OPERATOR and implements, for example, what we have called performance operators in Section 44.7. The RUBATO® concept also includes distributed operability among difierent peers. This software is conceived as a musicological research platform and not a hard-coded device, we describe this approach. Concluding this chapter, we discuss the relation between frame and modules.