Common Music
![[Logo]](img/cmlogo.gif)
| What is Common Music? | Common Music (CM) is an object-oriented
music composition environment. It produces sound by transforming a
high-level representation of musical structure into a variety of contol
protocols for sound synthesis and display:
MIDI,
Csound,
Common Lisp Music,
Music Kit,
C Mix,
C Music,
M4C,
RT,
Mix,
VRML and
Common Music Notation.
Common Music defines an extensive library of compositional tools and
provides a public interface through which the composer may easily
modify and extend the system.
All ports of Common Music provide a text-based music composition
editor called
Stella.
A graphical interface called
Capella currently
runs only on the Macintosh. See
Documentation for more information.
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| History | Common Music began in 1989 as a response to the proliferation of different audio hardware, software and computers that resulted from the introduction of low cost processors. As choices increased it became clear that composers would be well served by a system that defined a portable, powerful and consistent interface to the myriad sound rendering possibilities. Work on Common Music began in 1989 when the author was a guest composer at CCRMA, Stanford University. Most of the system as it exists today was implemented at the Institut für Musik und Akustik at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, where the author worked for five years. Common Music continues to evolve today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the author is now a professor of music composition. In 1996 Common Music received First Prize in the computer-assisted composition category at the 1er Concours International de Logiciels Musicaux in Bourges, France. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Implementation | Common Music is implemented in Common Lisp and CLOS and runs on a variety of computers, including NeXT, Macintosh, SGI, SUN, and i386. Source code. binary images and patches are freely available at several internet sites. In order to compile the source code you need Common Lisp. The best implementations are commercial products but there are also several good public domain implementations available on the Internet. See Lisp Ports and Installing Common Music for more information. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Synthesis Control |
Each synthesis target is represented as a "syntax" in Common Music. Any combination of syntaxes can be included when the system is built from its sources. The available syntaxes are:
Whenever possible, CM sends and receives directly to and from the target. Otherwise, a file can be generated and sent to the target automatically so that the process of producing sound appears seamless and transparent. All ports of CM support reading level 0 and 1 MIDI files and writing level 0 files. Direct-to-driver MIDI input and output is supported for the following configurations:
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| Documentation |
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| LISP Ports |
Common Music has been ported to the following Common Lisp
implementations:
Common Music is known to work in the following configurations:
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| Contact |
Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments. To receive email information about software releases or to track developments in CCRMA's family of Lisp music programs: CM, CLM and CMN please join cmdist@ccrma.stanford.edu by sending your request to cmdist-request@ccrma.stanford.edu.
Rick Taube |