MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs. MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making sound on a digital computer, and the first to gain wide acceptance in the music research community.

Design

All MUSIC-N derivative programs have a common design made up of a library of functions built around simple signal processing and synthesis routines (written as "opcodes" or unit generators). These simple opcodes are then constructed by the user into an instrument (usually through a text-based instruction file, but increasingly through a graphical interface) that defines a sound which is then "played" by a second file (called the score file) which specifies notes, durations, pitches, amplitudes, and other musical parameters. Some variants of the language merge the instrument and score, though most still distinguish between control-level functions and functions that run at the sampling rate of the audio being generated. A notable exception is ChucK, which unifies audio-rate and control-rate timing into a single framework.

MUSIC-N and derived software are mostly available as complete self-contained programs, which can have different types of user-interfaces, from text- to GUI-based ones. In this aspect, Csound and RTcmix have since evolved to work effectively as software libraries which can be accessed through a variety of frontends and programming languages, such as C, C++, Java, Python, Tcl, Lua, Lisp, Scheme, etc., as well as other music systems such as Pure Data, Max/MSP, and the plugin frameworks LADSPA and VST.

A number of highly original (and to this day largely unchallenged) assumptions are implemented in MUSIC and its descendants about the best way to create sound on a computer. Many of Mathews' implementations (such as using pre-calculated arrays for waveform and envelope storage, the use of a scheduler that runs in musical time rather than at audio rate) are the norm for most hardware and software synthesis and audio DSP systems today.

Family

MUSIC included a number of variants, e.g.:

  • MUSIC was developed by Mathews on an IBM 704 at Bell Labs in 1957

Further reading

  • (HTML version available)

See also

  • Comparison of audio synthesis environments