Music 220b: Lecture 3 Slides

Common Music Class hierarchy

Here is a slide showing the current hierarchy of Common Music classes. Most of this classes can create objects (instantiate them) that are musically useful and can be made part of your Common Music / Stella score.

The two main branches split the hierarchy into Container and Element. A generic Container is a box that can hold objects (which can be Containers or Elements themselves). An Element is a note or a rest. Some containers are really boxes, like the Threads. You stuff objects inside and they stay there till you erase or modify them explicitly. A different kind of container is an Algorithm. It is also a box but it holds a program inside instead of objects. That program can create objects on demand when the container is "played".

Item Streams

Item streams are Common Music objects that package a pattern creation hierarchy of classes in a very convenient way. Each item stream has two main characteristics:

the type of pattern that will be used to arrange the contained objects
the interpretation the item stream tries to do of the objects themselves

Here's a slide with the pattern types that are currently available in Common Music:

And this are the item stream data types:

Music 220b: Lecture 3 Slides

Common Music Class hierarchy

Item Streams

The Algorithm container

The MusicKit: Synthpatches overview

The MusicKit: Wavetable synthpatches

The MusicKit: Envelopes

The MusicKit: Wavetables