Machine Tongues XVII: CLM: Music V Meets Common Lisp

Abstract

As the 1980s wore to an end, the wonderful PDP-10 and Samson box (Samson 1985) at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) began to seem fatally old-fashioned. MIDI was everyone's new darling; tape music was dead. Worse, the old 1960s vintage hardware began to fall apart, and the repairs rivaled the designs of Rube Goldberg. When CCRMA decided to buy NeXT computers, it became painfully obvious how much we were losing-hundreds of thousands of lines of unportable Sail, Fail, and FORTRAN code, hundreds of years of effort, and the best FM synthesizer anywhere, all tossed into the trash heap. I had spent more than ten years building a little computer nest (Schottstaedt 1983) and, in the course of writing more than 20 pieces, had become very much at home there. The move to the NeXT set me back ten years with no straightforward way to recover my favorite instruments or composing tools. I had three choices: the NeXT MusicKit (Jaffe 1989), Csound (Vercoe 1991), or start all over from the beginnning. The NeXT MusicKit was similar to the Samson box system we had just left, and CSound was essentially the same as the old Mus10 world, an outgrowth of Music V (Mathews 1969; Pope 1993) that the Samson box software had replaced. Both of these choices were familiar, and both were in use by real composers, so I started out on the assumption that one or the other would become my new home. I tackled the MusicKit first. It provides a sophisticated entry into the NeXT sound-support hardware, including highly optimized access to the NeXT's built-in Motorola DSP56000, a 24-bit microprocessor aimed at common digital signal-processing tasks. Unfortunately, one DSP56000 is not a Samson box. It can just barely synthesize two FM violins (Schottstaedt 1977) in real time, but I was used to using as many as 50. To continue writing the kind of music I like to write, I would have to split up the note lists into 56000-size pieces, then do lots of overlays. In addition, the MusicKit's real-time orientation leads to complicated envelope and instrument definitions and makes it difficult to get at individual samples. Despite my admiration for the job David Jaffe and Julius Smith have done, the more I looked into the MusicKit, the less I seemed to be getting from it. On the other hand, Csound, which several of my friends use and regard very highly, did not run at that time on the NeXT, and my attempt to port it failed. So, I sat down to write yet another version of Music V.