2.2 The Musical Framework

OpenMusic offers a set of predefined classes and generic functions for musical representation and manipulation. There are three main possibilities to extend this framework: creating new classes by using inheritance; defining new methods in generic functions or writing new generic functions. OpenMusic provides predefined editors for these three operations. A summary of the predefined musical classes available in OpenMusic is given in Figure 4.

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There are three main classes of musical objects:

• Superposition: chords and polyphonies are made of other objects placed in parallel.
• Sequence: objects like voices or measures are composed by other objects one after the other.
• Simple-score-element: these objects are terminal.