eschew the millennium of prescription and return to what might be aptly called “new neumatic notation.” The 20th century witnessed many examples of the abstraction of notation, returning to “pictographic” suggestions of sound, often open to much interpretation by the performer. A stark connection can be drawn between the neumatic notation of the Middle Ages and the “new neumatic notation” found in Earle Brown’s String Quartet (1965), clearly referencing this less prescriptive musical encryption method (see Figure 14). Other examples of this return to “suggestive” rather than prescription notation include (among many others) Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus (1959), Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark (1964), John Cage’s Song Books (1970), Krzysztof Penderecki’s De natura sonoris (1966), and John Zorn’s Cobra (1984). (see Figure 15)
Figure 14: The first page from Earle Brown's "String Quartet" from 1965.
Figure 15: The first page from Morton Feldman's "King of Denmark" from 1964.
If I may, in conclusion I wish to address one further development in the encoding of music, which will, by association, return us to our beginning with Herbert Brün, master of electronic music in the 20th century. This innovation, which you might have already guessed by now, is so significant that it might even supersede all of the above innovations, for it, in itself alone, needs no form of “musical” encryption in order to deliver to us the musics that we love and study; this discovery and its consequent innovations have even the power to encode a music that has no other means of notation: the Fourier Transform and the development of the “wave file”.  The ability to encode music as purely mathematical summations of sine waves and the second ability to unpack that data and audiate it with as few as one vibrating membrane through the computational power of the Fourier Transformation has perhaps shaped our musical world more today than anything else. Recorded sound that can be played anywhere at any time given the audio equipment necessary – which only becomes smaller and better with each successive year – has been profoundly transformative in how we hear, learn, understand, and use music. In a beautifully abstract way – or perhaps profoundly concrete way – the wave file is the most precise manner to encode musical meaning. It is so universally applicable and mathematically fundamental, that we have felt comfortable sending such musical artifacts to the stars in hopes that perhaps an alien race or a distant future version of ourselves might find it floating in the outer emptiness around our star (see Figure 16). This manner of sonic encryption is so powerful, so precise, so fundamental to the function of physics and our universe that we feel confident that the modest handful of wave files precisely engraved to the posterity of perhaps hundreds of billions of years on a golden disc,  if found by any intelligent life form, will communicate, in some fashion, the intellect of us who encoded it and our noble and urgent search for meaning in millennia of wave summation.
Figure 16: The Kepler Golden Record, on which is encoded our lingual, musical, semiotic, and mathematical "hello" to the universe and any intelligent life form which may, in the distant future, find it floating amongst the stars.
 See Brün, Herbert. When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün.; Smith, Stuart Saunders, and Thomas DeLio. Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments. I often personally cite Professor Paul Koonce from the University of Florida for this quotation, though I know it was never originally his; I simply recall in many classes on style and electro-acoustic music him returning to this phrase and the aesthetic, philosophical, and linguistic implications of such as idea.
 For example, while our “modern” system of musical notation has been present, in some form, since arguably the end of the 16th century and assuredly by the beginning of the 17th century, modern expectations of this system have o