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A system for music printing by computer

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Notes

  1. L. A. Hiller, Jr., and L. M. Isaacson,Experimental Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).

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  2. A historical survey of computer composition of music is given by Hiller in an essay in Harry B. Lincoln, ed.,The Computer and Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). For an extensive theoretical and practical discussion of Xenakis' work, see Iannis Xenakis,Formalized Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). See also Bruce Rogers, “A User's Manual for the Stochastic Music Program” (unpublished honors research paper, Indiana University, 1972).

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  3. See M. V. Mathews et al.,The Technology of Computer Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).

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  4. See Rogers, op. cit., 42.

  5. This is somewhat unfair to the authors of interactive systems, since they usually have in mind a music editor, while what I'm talking about is really a music formatter. See the Cantor article referenced in note 14.

  6. See for example Anthony Donato,Preparing Music Manuscript (Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

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  7. L. A. Hiller, Jr., and R. A. Baker, “Automated Music Printing,”Journal of Music Theory 9 (Spring 1965), 129–150.

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  8. Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, “The Ford-Columbia Input Language” in Barry Brook, ed., 48–52.

  9. This and several other projects are briefly mentioned in op. cit., xiii-xiv.

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  10. “Musical Plotter Knows the Score at University of Toronto,”CalComp Newsletter, May/June 1967.

  11. Norbert Böker-Heil, “Plotting Conventional Music Notation,”Journal of Music Theory 16, double issue 1 and 2 (1972), 72–101.

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  12. Murray Gould and George Logemann, “ALMA: Alphameric Language for Music Analysis” in Brook, op. cit., 57–90.

  13. Don Cantor, “A Computer Program that Accepts Common Musical Notation,”Computers and the Humanities 6 (November 1971), 103–110.

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  14. Leland Smith, “Editing and Printing Music by Computer,”Journal of Music Theory 17, 2 (Fall 1973), 292–309.

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  15. Armando Dal Molin, “The Music Reprographics System,”Computational Musicology Newsletter 1, 1 (October 1973), 8.

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  16. Jerome Wenker, private communication, February 1974.

  17. Jef Raskin, “A Hardware Independent Computer Graphics System,” master's thesis in computer science, Pennsylvania State University, 1967.

  18. Most of the well-known input languages are described in Brook, op. cit.

  19. See Donald Byrd, “Transcription by Plotter,”Random Bits (Indiana University), 5 (May 1970), 1, 6–8.

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  20. SMUT 1.1A is available from and copyright 1972 by Donald Byrd, Wrubel Computing Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47401. The current version is available for CDC 6000/76000/CYBER 70 or IBM 360/370 computers.

  21. JANUS reads data giving, for each note, the attack time and duration in decimal seconds, the number of the instrument to play, pitch, dynamic level, and optional information on glissandi or other parameters. (This is the same information required by most sound synthesis programs; See M. V. Mathews et al.,The Technology of Computer Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).) JANUS then finds a good approximation in CMN for the rhythm of each beat and outputs its SMUT equivalent plus an optional graphic score. Fig. 2 is the plot drawn by JANUS and SMUT for instrument 1 of class 2 in the run of Xenakis' program shown in Fig. 1.

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  22. See Jerome Wenker, “A Computer Oriented Music Notation including Ethnomusicological Symbols” in Brook, op. cit., 91–129. A translater and several analysis programs for MUSTRAN-format data are already available from Wenker at 11 Carlton Club Drive, Piscataway, NJ 08854. He is now working on a translator for an extended set of symbols that includes practically every symbol used in Western art music since 1600 or in ethnomusicology.

  23. An early version of this program is described in Donald Byrd, “Creative Work in Humanities Programming,”Random Bits (Indiana University) 6 (January 1971), 1, 8–12.

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  24. See Iannis Xenakis,Formalized Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).

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  25. This application was suggested by John Nagosky of Indiana University, who is now using an operatic information retrieval program with printer output.

  26. See David S. Prerau, “Computer Pattern Recognition of Standard Engraved Music Notation” (Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1970). Gary Wittlich is now working on a more ambitious project at Indiana University; see “Project SCORE”,Computational Musicology Newsletter 1, 1 (October 1973), 6.

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Byrd, D. A system for music printing by computer. Comput Hum 8, 161–172 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02402135

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