[CM] Music5

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 05:57 -0700, Bill Schottstaedt wrote:
>> Thanks Dave!  I'm all smiles.  And thanks Nando-in-the-Other-Hemisphere.
>> I'm hoping to get some music -- Max mentioned that others have wanted
>> to use music5, and I can't see any reason why my fm-violin wouldn't work.
>> I think I found a reverberator from that era, without which there's no point
>> in going on.
>>
>> But first, I need to get file IO squared away.
> 
> Woohoo!...
> 
> In my first class here (at TU-Berlin) I gave a short "history of
> computer music" introduction[*] and I toured through the music n
> languages lineage. It would have been superb to be able to open a
> terminal, run a PDPx emulator and actually compile a score! Of course
> the emulator should have a "native speed" option to slow down things to
> the crawling pace of that time...
> 
> -- Fernando
> 
> [*] an extension of the slide show Juan Pablo Caceres created for our
> workshop in Mexico. 
> 
> 
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You're bringing back fond memories here. I was an undergrad at the 
University of Illinois from 1959 -- 1962. In that period, I was exposed 
to Lejaren Hiller and the ILLIAC suite, Harry Partch, and Alwin Nikolai. 
I learned to program on ILLIAC I, heard it play music via timed loops 
and a speaker hooked up to the sign bit of the accumulator register, and 
listened to the sounds that the plot routine made when creating 
microfilm output.

And I dreamed of having a computer that would compose and perform music. 
I never got a chance to actually touch such a machine until the 
Altair/KIM-1 days, except for some brief off-hours experiments with an 
IBM 1620, a transistor radio and a tape recorder and some experiments 
with a Control Data 924.

So now I have all the magic, and anyone can get something absolutely 
stupendous in this arena for under $1000 US -- you can probably even do 
it on a $500 dual-core laptop in Windows. The $200 OLPC XO runs CSound. 
What a long strange trip it has been, indeed.