In the past I wrote pieces by creating structures and then creating material that conformed to the nature of the structures. More recently I have tried using drawings and other types of freeform sketches to orient my thinking. What I want to try next is a riff on BDD (Behavior Driven Development) which is used in software development.
I would say that BDD describes what happens under certain circumstances and how. It is often written in very plain language, such as "When I click submit, I am asked Are you sure?"
How I imagine it working in a piece would be something like this:
As I listen to the first movement of xxx,
I often hear high pitch sounds immediately followed by low pitched sounds
I sometimes hear only one instrument at a time
I notice the length of pitches usually decreases
It's really just another way to describe a wishlist. Since my day job is Software Engineer, it corresponds to how I think (sometimes - although I use TDD/unit tests at work).
In actual BDD, you would be able to run tests using a test runner, in this case I don't believe there is a way to do that. Even if you used Abjad, although perhaps you could write unit tests.
I'm going to use this approach as I re-write The Color Bars. We will see how it goes!