[Q] Music, MIDI and squeak where to start ?

Boris Gaertner Boris.Gaertner at gmx.net
Thu Sep 12 16:41:09 UTC 2002


Martin Drautzburg <martin.drautzburg at web.de> wrote:

> I am getting interested in doing some music in squeak. 
> 
> I am NOT looking for a sequencer but rather something that allows to
> express high-level musical concepts such as "similarity" and
> "conrast". I might try to write something myself in that area.
> 
> Where would I start to explore what capabilities are already present
> in squeak. I believe MIDI input and output it all there right ? How
> about writing scores (sheet music) ?
> 
To the best of my knowledge there is no editor for conventional
musical notation available in Squeak. (A very good editor at a very
reasonable price is Mozart. Look at: http://www.mozart.co.uk/).
The lack of a scores editor is a surprise - more then ten years
ago there was a very good music editor available for Smalltalk-80.
('Amused', by Andreas Mahling, Juergen Herczeg, Michael Herczeg,
Heinz-Dieter Broecker from Clique-Software - now Ars Nova.
Perhaps one should ask there about the fate of that code. I 
remember a presentation that Andreas gave during a fair in
Munich - he gave it on an Atari Mega and it was a fascinating
contrast to all the boring business software around. 'Amused'
used some knowledge representation to assist in writing music
-these were certainly high-level musical concepts. Those with
access to a scientific library will find an article about an early version
of 'Amused' in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 439)

> I have the "multimedia" book and it mentions "siren". But I only
> understood half of it and it didn't mention any high-level concepts, so
> I belive it is not exactly what I want.
> 
Siren has a lot of high-level musical concepts and is certainly worth
a closer examination. I did not look at it very carefully, but my
first impression was that some broken parts make a quick
success difficult. It is of course possible to express this
in a more inviting form: Siran can certainly profit from some
enthusiastic supporters. The preferred platform for Siren is
Visual Works - the Squeak version is seemingly a by-product.

My impression was that Siren is focused to less conventional
notations and presentation forms, but please note that I am
not an expert. My knowledge (like that of most amateurs)
is limited to conventional notation systems. I think that
Siren is a framework for both conventional and experimental
notation.
Siren uses the database framework MinneStore in some way 
to create a database of music, but I have to confess that I did 
not even try to get it running.

The official Siren home page is http://www.create.ucsb.edu/Siren.
To get Siren, please try this: ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu/pub/Siren
I hope that these addresses are still valid, but you would best
begin with : http://www.create.ucsb.edu

Hope this helps
Boris




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