Programmer Evan Montpellier, working with Nicolas Bernier's Laboratoire formes • ondes at Université de Montréal, built a suite of free Max for Live devices called SIGN/e — Symbol-based Interface for Graphic Notation/Edition. Rather than drawing graphic symbols in Illustrator, exporting an image, and then struggling to align it against a DAW timeline pixel by pixel, SIGN/e places those symbols directly inside an Ableton Live session. A PNG is placed on the timeline and animated in real time: a circle can rotate to indicate a roll; a line can scroll to guide a glissando. Live performers read these moving symbols during performance — not static notes on paper. Version 1.0.0 was released May 12, 2026. An accompanying paper by Pierre-Luc Lecours and Nicolas Bernier appeared in the Cambridge journal Organised Sound in February 2026. The tool is free and open source, available at GitHub (LFO-lab/SIGNe).

SIGN/e's structural position becomes clear when you identify the three already-constructs it chisels simultaneously. First: Common Western Notation as the universal grammar connecting composers to performers — 500 years of staff, clef, and note, extended digitally by Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico, always as a separate document disconnected from performance software. Second: the DAW session as closed electronic performance — Ableton's timeline aims inward at speakers; performers are producers, not score-readers. Third: the avant-garde graphic-score tradition (Cage, Feldman, Cardew, 1950s–70s) — now fully art-world-named historical artifacts, canonical, museumified. SIGN/e chisels the intersection of all three: the score lives inside the DAW session, animated not static; the DAW timeline points outward toward live performers, not only toward speakers, for the first time.

What the chisel opens is the remainder. It has two layers. The first is the animated graphic symbol as a genuinely new notational primitive — the rotating circle, the scrolling line — formal elements that exist in no prior notation grammar. These primitives are suited precisely to what Nicolas Bernier calls "controlled accidents": the knob turn, the hand sweep across a synthesizer, the sonic surprise that emerges from complex processing chains. This is the kind of performative act that Common Western Notation has always been constitutionally unable to notate — not because no one tried, but because the logic of CWN requires a predictable link between symbol and sound, and electronic music's characteristic unpredictability destroys that link. The second layer is the DAW timeline as a shared temporal medium between electronic music and live performers — conductor, score, and performance machine sharing a single timeline. This was latent in every DAW with a timeline since the 1990s. No one had actualized it until SIGN/e.

The constructs SIGN/e works against are closing rapidly. AI music generation (Suno, Udio, Stable Audio) is cementing the equation: electronic music = closed AI product = no live performers needed. The inward-pointing DAW model is approaching full seal. TENOR 2026 (Vienna, May) and the Organised Sound paper are the first institutional approaches to naming what SIGN/e opens — but naming is not yet complete. Bernier's ongoing summer 2026 collaboration with guitarist Simon Trottier means the logic is still growing, still unresolved. In the chisel-construct cycle, SIGN/e is at the chisel moment: actualized, but not yet fully named. When "animated graphic notation embedded in a DAW" becomes a standard feature category — when Dorico for electronic performers is a thing — what is visible today settles into the sediment of the past construct. Right now, it is still alive.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics