[CM] music5

[Frank Brickle]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Bill Schottstaedt
<bil at ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:
> I got Max's book, and it answers my questions: there were no
>  real differences between music 4 and 5 (the latter tried to avoid
>  machine code, instruments and note lists could occur in the
>  same file, and the input syntax was lightened up a bit).

Umm...sort of. In Music IV the orchestra is entirely in Fortran.
There's no instrument definition language per se. Each "instrument"
needs separately-callable initialization and execution routines. The
unit generators are simply function calls. State has to be managed
explicitly by the user.

What does Music 5 do about user-processing of the note lists? Music IV
provides entries for user-written routines that get called after the
input pass (Pass 1) and the sorting pass (Pass 2).

A lot of what gave Music IV its kick was having the unit generators
written in assembler. They were surprisingly easy to write IIRC. They
were the introduction to 360 assembler for a number of us. What a
precious skill *that* turned out to be...

Frank

>  Also, Max himself did the 36-bit stuff -- that was not for
>  the PDP-10, but for the GE645 -- I didn't even know General
>  Electric made a computer.  And I now have copiously
>  annotated input, so I have no excuse.
>
>
>
>
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