Ambiguity and Multiplicity in Music Representation

Two evident problems in representing music are ambiguity and multiplicity. It is clear that the ‘same’ music can be represented in different ways. Some differences are simply because different facets of the music are represented: a score represents different things from an audio recording. Here I am concerned about differences which have at their root actual differences either in the detail of the music itself or in how the music is conceived. (Whether the ‘music itself’ and ‘how the music is conceived’ are different things is an issue I will not address here.) I refer to these differences by the umbrella ‘ambiguity and multiplicity’. ‘Ambiguity’ means that there are possibly incompatible differences in the music or the conception of the music, and we do not know which is correct. ‘Multiplicity’ means that there are differences which are possibly all correct.