The AWK and Perl programming languages offer powerful facilities to search and manipulate text files - principally through their support for Regular Expressions. The above two pages are dedicated to using the powerful features of awk and perl, to create analytical scripts capable of searching music scores converted to a textual form, to retrieve useful information and hopefully, gain some interesting insights into their form and structure.
The project is at this early stage, little more than an idea and a number of experimental scripts, which have not been extensively tested... so their may be an occasional surprise!
The AWK scripts and manual were written back in January 2003 and have been left untouched until now (Sept. 2005) as this analytical project led me into thinking about how to create another data format for music: that is rather than using a textual description of the music, to make instead a data format based on (nested) harmonic series. Out of this idea came the realisation that such a type of data format might actually be, in essence, a description of a physical process of oscillatory computation. Developing this idea has now become the principle focus of my efforts.
Now that the initial development work on the model of 'modulating oscillatory systems' (MOS model) is reasonably complete and being written up (*details below) there may be time to go on and develop the scripts, hopefully, using perl's more wide ranging facilities to create and manipulate this new music-data format using real music examples. The new perl scripts are available and described in some detail on the Perl page.
After writing the initial Archive articles and subsequently placing other documents here on my website, I have now collected all the documents together (with music examples) on a CD, under the rather ambitious title 'Journey to the Heart of Music'. There is about three hundred pages of text and one hundred pages of music.