The MusES system: an environment for experimenting with knowledge representation techniques in tonal harmony

We report here on current works on the MusES environment, designed for experimenting with various objectoriented knowledge representation techniques in the field of tonal harmony. The first layer of MusES is a repository of consensus knowledge about tonal harmony, including an explicit representation of enharmonic spelling, as well as representation of intervals, scales and chords that support standard computations. We give an overview of several systems built on top of MusES: a system for the analysis of jazz chord sequences, a system for the automatic generation of harmonizations, and a system that generates real-time jazz improvisations. We give an overview of MusES and its extensions and discuss several representation issues and their solutions in MusES.