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Common Music

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Common Music

Common Music (CM) is a music composition environment that produces sound by transforming a high-level representation of musical structure into a variety of control protocols for sound synthesis and display. The Common Music 3 (CM3) branch is implemented in Scheme and C++ and optimized for use in interactive and real-time composition. Musical algorithms can run in real time, or faster-than-real time for file-based composition. CM supports two languages for designing musical algorithms: the native Scheme and SAL, an easy-to-learn, expressive infix language (see ICMC '07). Binary archives of CM contain two fully relocatable applications: bin/Grace is the GUI environment and bin/cm is a console version of the same basic runtime but suitable for using as an inferior scheme process within Emacs. See the readme.text for more information.

Grace

Grace (Graphical Realtime Algorithmic Composition Environment) is a cross-platform GUI app for algorithmic music composition with CM3. It is implemented in JUCE (C++) and contains the Scheme interpreter built into it. The Grace code editor supports both SAL and Scheme languages with evaluation, syntax highlighting (code coloring), help lookup for defined symbols and many Emacs cursor motion commands. View screenshots.

Documentation

History

Common Music began in 1989 as a response to the proliferation of different audio hardware, software and computers that resulted from the introduction of low cost computers. As choices increased it became clear that composers would be well served by a portable, powerful and consistent interface to the myriad sound rendering possibilities. Work on Common Music began in 1989 when the author was a guest composer at CCRMA, Stanford University. Much of the system as it exists today was implemented at the Institut für Musik und Akustik at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, where the author worked for five years. Common Music continues to evolve today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the author is now an associate professor of music composition. In 1996 Common Music received First Prize in the computer-assisted composition category at the 1er Concours International de Logiciels Musicaux in Bourges, France.

CM is released under the LLGPL (Lisp Lesser General Public License).

Contact

Please contact me with questions or comments or to tell me of any compositions you create using CM. To receive email information about CCRMA's family of Lisp music programs (CM, Snd and CMN) please join the CMDIST mailing list by e-mailing your request to: cmdist-request@ccrma.stanford.edu.

Rick Taube
Associate Professor Composition/Theory
School of Music
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL
Net: taube@uiuc.edu
Fax: +1 (217) 355 5780
Vox: +1 (217) 244 2684