If musical data processing is essential us so much today, it is that it gradually created tools which are radically modifying the manner of thinking the music. However, its history is short. It merges with the development of numerical technologies: computers, initially, accompanied by creation by the languages symbolic intended for the programming, then with a whole troop of inventions in numerical technology. Enough early in its history, data processing will be shown sufficiently ripe to accommodate concerns of all kinds, energy of accountancy to scientific research, while passing naturally by what interests us, artistic creation.
And it is undoubtedly there that it is necessary to distinguish what arises from data processing itself, and what belongs rather to the broader world of numerical technology. The music amply draws from these two fields its new resources. However, since the field of the sound is converted today into audio numerical, the distinction is essential. Musical data processing is born from the meeting of the musical concerns and the environment resulting from numerical technologies and the specificity of the computer, on the one hand, and of the scientific fields which clarify its research topics. If the musical composition appears there in good place, practically all the other activities of the music are found there. And musical research partly covers the ground cleared by data processing, acoustics, the treatment of the signal, even cognitive psychology: thus musical data processing is at the center of several musical, scientific and technical fields.
