A terminal for music manuscript input

Abstract

In the past fifteen years a large number of projects linking computer technology with music analysis, composition and printed reproduction have been proposed or implemented with varying degrees of success. In all but the purely machine compositional, one of the major considerations has been the means of translating an existing music manuscript into a form suitable for computer use. The primary method has been to encode the composition with an alphanumeric terminal using one of several languages designed for this purpose (e.g., DARMS, IML). The weakness of this system lies in the lack of visual feedback to the encoder. Of other attempted methods using various technologies such as graphic tablets or direct piano keyboard encoding, none has gained widespread acceptance because of cost and other problems. A commercially developed terminal specifically designed for encoding music manuscripts in a truly interactive manner, considerably more efficient and cost-effective than other existing means, would obviously serve an important function in musicology as well. In the 1940's as part of an attempt to mechanize certain aspects of the music engraving industry, I developed the first mechanical music typewriter, the Music Writer. In the early 1950's, the Music Writer was modified to operate electrically and a paper tape punch was attached to provide digitized spacing and line justification. In 1964 the PCS-300 Music Keypunch was produced, a direct outgrowth of the modified Music Writer but with many improvements. Several PCS-300's have been the sole input devices in the computer-driven music engraving process developed by me and in use since 1969. In this process, the manuscript is encoded on paper tape by the PCS-300 and the tape becomes the input to a set of page layout programs which run on a DEC PDP-8 computer that in turn produces a set of directives to a Photon printer. The PCS-300's have served admirably, enabling us to produce over 1000 pages of quality music engraving each month. However, they have the inherent disadvantages of electromechanical devices: complexity, noise, and the need for frequent main enance. In addition, production of these devic s n small quantities is costly. Over the last few years, the widespread availability of inexpensive microprocessors has afected profoundly the design of specialized devices in myriad applications. When I set about designing a replacement for the PCS-300, I had in mind several objectives: the new device had to be essentially compatible with the PCS-300 from the operator's viewpoint, the encoding of the musi manuscript had to be the same as that produced by the PCS-300 (although certainly paper tape would no longer be the medium), there must be simple yet powerful editing and correction facilities (sorely lacking in the PCS-300), and, finally, the overall hardware costs had to be tightly controlled since the economics of the music engraving business do not allow for luxuries. I used a popular microprocessor (Intel 8080A) and relatively inexpensive CRT technology to develop the PCS-500 Music CRT, a terminal which is proving to be efficient, economical and versatile. The operator of the PCS-500 uses a straightforward scheme for encoding a manuscript. This same scheme has been used successfully with the PCS-300 for ten years. Each item in the manuscript is entered through the terminal as a combination of a pitch, a character and one or several spaces (hence the terminal name: Pitch, Character, Space) as if it were