Systematic notations and the relations between paper and music

Building on the representational analytics of British academic John Willats, and the work of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, this paper describes an investigation of articulate notation systems such as the Western Music notation, or the Laban movement notation, as control-interfaces which permit their users to map to and from a conjunctive space-time of performance. In other classifications that include them, music notations have been insufficiently explained, sometimes subsumed into categories of diagram, or at best thrown down as a kind of hub, vaguely associated with an unwieldy number of relations. In this paper, an assessment will be made of the relationship between music notations and other drawing systems, in which the reader will see that they are hybrid representation systems, mapping to and from a conjunctive space-time of performance, with characteristics of all of writing, pictorial and denotative drawing.