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THE MICRO-COMPUTER AS AN INPUT DEVICE FOR MUSIC ANALYSIS
OR COMPOSITION BY COMPUTER
Charles G. Boody
Belle Plaine, Minn.
The need to "translate" standard musical notation into
alphanumeric data has caused major difficulties for those
using the computer as a tool in music analysis or composi
tion. To date, most of the more than forty methods
developed have depended on some sort of music representation
utilizing the standard ASCII character set. DARMS developed
by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg1, MUSTRAN developed by Jerome
Wenker2, and the "Plaine and Easie Code" with its' extension
ALMA developed by Barry Brook, Murray Gould and George
Logemann3 have been the most widely used and seem to be
the most fully developed. Such representations are far
from ideal. It is necessary to learn and use a whole new
set of symbols to replace the conventional symbols of
notation. Making this "translation" can introduce errors
into the material. Checking the encoded music is time
consuming and difficult because of the unacustomed symbols.
Other methods of entering music into computers have
also been tried. Among them: music typewriters4; playing
the music on a keyboard instrument5; the light pencil and
cathode ray tube6, and optical scanning of previously printed
music7. Each of these methods suffers from one or more
of these weaknesses: The equipment is highly specialized
and quite costly. The theoretical capabilities exist, but
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