Music, in many cultures is an aural art. The composer is also a performer and the music is passed on to other composer/performers largely by means of an aural tradition. In aural tradition, music is always experience in real time—that is, the music must actually be performed to be learned or created.

In the Euro-American tradition, especially since the onset of printing and publishing, the creation of music has been a written tradition. In this tradition, the music is composed out of real time. This means that the composer, by ‘reading’ the music, can ponder and edit the music by converting visual images into sound images. The process here is much like that of a writer or painter in that the editing need not be in any order.   More detail...