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Unix music tools at bellcore
Author(s) -
Langston Peter S.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380201306
Subject(s) - unix , computer science , interfacing , scope (computer science) , software , software engineering , process (computing) , programming language , set (abstract data type) , software development , operating system , computer hardware
A number of Bellcore projects have required software to manipulate musical data at a range of different conceptual levels from notes to whole classes of pieces. In the absence of suitable preexisting software for these projects, a set of modules was written in house to run under the Unix® operating system. These programs were designed to be tools, each performing a specific subtask with little or no preconception of the particular combinations in which they would be used. Toward that end, a standard internal data representation was chosen, and all programs were either written to process that format directly or, as more conceptual needs arose, to process a format that could be converted to the standard. This report describes our experience in the development of software to implement languages and data descriptions specialized to the manipulation of musical entities. It explains why we did not settle for existing software and gives some examples of the utility of well‐designed music tools. We give an overview of the scope of the software and describe our solutions to the problems of interfacing music synthesizers with computers.