An Introduction to the Play Program

Abstract

PLAY was first written during the spring and summer of 1977 at the Electronic Music Studio at State University of New York at Albany.* It grew out of our knowledge of several other programs and systems, particularly Groove and The Conductor Program from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Donald Buchla's Series 500 Electric Music Box and Salvatore Martirano's SalMar Construction. Our intention in PLAY was to maximize a composer's flexibility in conceptualizing temporal processes, and, consequently, although traditional musical problems may easily be solved with PLAY, the formats in PLAY are not rooted in traditional concepts or notation. Further, because we feel that small interactive systems offer important advantages to composers, we designed the program to be used with a small, portable computer controlling an external synthesizer, analog or digital, video or audio, in realtime and with extensive interaction capability.** As a specific example to convey the general principles of organization and the operating procedures of the program, we will, in this article, describe PLAYl, a version of the PLAY program optimized for the PDP11 in the Albany studio.