A certain idea of formal organization naturally underlies any stage of perception. We might refer to it indirectly, through notions like shape, contour or proportion. This is also true for music, although modern music-theoretical approaches tend to favor more abstract objects of analysis, like sets or classes. The purpose of the present work is to provide with the necessary methodological fundament to apply the latest findings in transformational music theory to the analysis of generalized formal structures. This suggests another degree of abstraction, and offers a new analytic perspective as well as a compositional tool able to construct analogies among very diverse sources of formal information.