Programming Languages for Computer Music Synthesis, Performance, and Composition

Abstract

The development of formal, descriptive, and procedural notations has become a practical concern within the field of music now that computers are being applied to musical tasks. Music combines the real-time demands of performance with the intellectual demands of highly developed symbolic systems that are quite different from natural language. The richness and variety of these demands makes the programming language paradigm a natural one in the musical application of computers. This paradigm provides musicians with a fresh perspective on their work. At the same time, music is a very advanced form of human endeavor, making computer music applications a worthy challenge for computer scientists. In this paper we outline the traditional tasks and forms of representation in music, then proceed with a survey of languages that deal with music programming. © 1985, ACM. All rights reserved.