Stephen Travis Pope

The AlloSphere: Immersive Multimedia for Scientific Discovery and Artistic Exploration

The AlloSphere is a spherical space in which immersive, virtual environments allow users to explore large-scale data sets through multimodal, interactive media.

Machine Tongues XV: Three Packages for Software Sound Synthesis

The origin of the technology and methodology of modern computer music is certainly the Music V family of software sound synthesis systems developed since the late 1950s. In the “old days,” this consisted of batch computer processing of musical programs expressed in terms of instrument definitions (programs) and score note lists (input data), generating sampled sound output data to off-line storage for later performance. The noticeable rekindling of interest in programs and languages for software sound synthesis (SWSS) and software digital audio signal processing (DSP) using general-purpose computers is due to a number of factors, not least among them the dramatic increase in the power of personal workstations over the last five years. There are currently three widely-used, portable, C-language SWSS tools: (in alphabetical order) cmix (Lansky 1990), cmusic (Moore 1990), and Csound (Vercoe 1991). This article will discuss the technology of SWSS and then present and compare these three systems. It is divided into three parts; the first introduces SWSS in terms of progressive examples. Part two compares the three systems using the same two instrument/score examples written in each of them. The final section presents informal benchmark tests of the systems run on two different hardware platforms—a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation-2 IPX and a Next Computer Inc. TurboCube machine—and subjective comments on various features of the languages and programming environments of stateof-the-art SWSS software. This author’s connection with this topic is that of extensive experience with several different SWSS systems over the last 15 years, starting with MUS10 and including all three compared here: Csound (in the form of Music-11 initially) at the CMRS studio in Salzburg (Pope 1982); cmusic in the CARL environment at PCS/Cadmus computers in Munich (Pope 1986); and more recently a combination of cmix, Csound, and various vocoder software packages with user interfaces written in Smalltalk-80 at the CCRMA Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University (Pope

The well-tempered object: musical applications of object-oriented software technology

This edited collection of articles from Computer Music Journal provides a timely and convenient source of tutorials on OOP languages and software design techniques and surveys a wide range of existing applications of this technology to music and digital signal processing. Object-oriented programming (OOP) is perhaps the most important new software engineering technology of the past decade and promises to be a key factor in much of the software of the 1990s. This edited collection of articles from Computer Music Journal provides a timely and convenient source of tutorials on OOP languages and software design techniques and surveys a wide range of existing applications of this technology to music and digital signal processing. Included are the popular OOP languages LISP, Smalltalk-80, and Objective-C, and applications such as music description and composition, real-time performance, and digital signal processing.Contents. Introduction. Tutorials and Technology. Machine Tongues VIII: The Design of a Smalltalk Music System, Glenn E. Krasner. Machine Tongues IX: Object-Oriented Programming, Henry Lieberman. Machine Tongues XI: Object-Oriented Software Design, Stephen Pope. Music Representation and Processing Tools. Flavors Band: A Language for Specifying Musical Style, Christopher Fry. FORMES: Composition and Scheduling of Processes, Xavier Roder and Pierre Cointe. An Introduction to the MODE System - A Musical Object Development Environment, Stephen Pope. An Overview of the Sound and Music Kits for the NeXT Computer, David Jaffe and Lee Boynton. Composition Systems. The Kyma/Platypus Computer Music Workstation, Carla Scaletti. An Introduction to the Creation Station, Henry Flurry. TTrees: A Tool for the Compositional Environment, Glendon Diener. Signal Processing Systems. Javelina: An Environment for Digital Signal Processor Software Development, Kurt Hebel. Virtual Digital Signal Processing in an ObjectOriented System, David Mellinger, Guy Garnett, and Bernard Mont-Reynaud.

The Interim DynaPiano: An Integrated Computer Tool and Instrument for Composers

models of the basic musical quantities (scalar magnitudes such as pitch, loudness or duration); instrument/note (voice/event, performer/music) abstractions; sound functions, granular description, or other (non-note-oriented) description abstractions; flexible grain-size of “events” in terms of “notes,” “grains,” “elements,” or “textures;” event, control, and sampled sound processing description levels; nested/hierarchical event-tree structures for flexible description of “parts,” “tracks,” or other parallel or sequential organizations; separation of “data” from “interpretation” (what vs. how in terms of providing for interpretation objects); abstractions for the description of “middle-level” musical structures (e.g., chords, clusters, or trills) (may be optional); annotation and marking of event tree structures supporting the creation of heterarchies (lattices) and hypermedia networks; annotation including common-practise notation possible;

A taxonomy of computer music

There are several sources for a possible taxonomy of computer music (Pope 1993). These include the tables of contents of the Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conferences and the excellent bibliography Computer Applications in Music, by Deta S. Davis. Three of the central contributors to the field — Roger Dannenberg, D. Gareth Loy, and Bruce Pennycook — have also at various times prepared subject keyword lists or taxonomies. These will all be presented and discussed below, and a new multi-layered taxonomy of keywords will be proposed.

Experiencing Audio and Music in a Fully Immersive Environment

The UCSB Allosphere is a 3-story-high spherical instrument in which virtual environments and performances can be experienced in full immersion. The space is now being equipped with high-resolution active stereo projectors, a 3D sound system with several hundred speakers, and with tracking and interaction mechanisms. The Allosphere is at the same time multimodal, multimedia, multi-user, immersive, and interactive. This novel and unique instrument will be used for research into scientific visualization/auralization and data exploration, and as a research environment for behavioral and cognitive scientists. It will also serve as a research and performance space for artists exploring new forms of art. In particular, the Allosphere has been carefully designed to allow for immersive music and aural applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the instrument, focusing on the audio subsystem. We give the rationale behind some of the design decisions and explain the different techniques employed in making the Allosphere a truly general-purpose immersive audiovisual lab and stage. Finally, we present first results and our experiences in developing and using the Allosphere in several prototype projects.

Object-oriented music representation

There is a rich literature on the design of formal languages for music representation on computers. Over the last thirty years, several generations of software technology have been applied to this problem, including structured software engineering, artificial intelligence, and objecthoriented (OhO) software technology. This article introduces the basic notions of OhO software technology, and investigates how these might be useful for music representation. In particular, the authors Smalltalk music object kernel (Smoke) music representation language is described and examples given that illustrate the most important of Smokes features.

Real-Time Performance via User Interfaces to Musical Structures

This informal and subjective presentation will introduce and compare several software systems written by the myself and others for computer music composition and perfor- mance based on higher-level abstractions of musical data structures. I will then evaluate a few of the issues in real-time interaction with structural descriptions of musical data. The premise is that very interesting live-performance software environments could be based in existing technology for structural music description, but that much of the current real-time performance-oriented software for music is rather limited in that it supports only very low-level notions of musical structures.The examples will demonstrate various systems for graphical interaction with procedural, knowledge-based, hierarchical and/or stochastic music description systems that could be used for live performance. Introduction This paper discusses various types of software man-machine interfaces to middle- and high-level musical structures in terms of their applicability to live performance. My con- tention is that there are many good ideas of graphical structure-editing-based interfaces already in the literature that could well be used for controlling performance at levels higher than those addressed by most current systems. The software systems described here can be divided into two classes: those that are primarily designed for use by compos- ers; and novel systems for graphical interaction with structured data. The paper opens with several comments about formalisms for composition, and how these might be relevant to live performance. This section is followed by a collection of an- notated examples of software man-machine interfaces for composition or other tasks, whereby the pertinence of each to live performance is discussed. Formalisms for Composition A number of compositional formalisms have been developed through the ages for var- ious types of music. The relationship between musical form and structure and composi- tional methods is taught in depth in music academies as part of our composition or performance training. In many musics, the role of text is central in the development of simple musical struc- tures; they often mirror the texts structure, as in the case of many songs or liturgical mu- sics. The central role of diatonic harmony as a structure-giving element in the western music of the last 400 years is also obvious. In the early 20th century, diatonic harmony was replaced with 12-tone formalisms without a parallel advancement in the structural 1. Authors current address: P. O. Box 9496, Berkeley, CA 94709 USA, email stp@CNMAT,Berkeley.edu

Producing Kombination XI: Using Modern Hardware and Software Systems for Composition

The author discusses two topics related to the realization of his composition Kombination XI: A Ritual Place for Live and Processed Voices. The first is his development of a notation system and a set of software tools based on weighted trees that span the expressive and structural domains of music. The second is his process of realization, in which several different digital signal-processing software and hardware systems were used in consort as one instrument.

Web.La.Radia: Social, Economic, and Political Aspects of Music and Digital Media

This article addresses the sociological, economical, and political relationships between electronic media art and its modes of production and dissemination. The core of the text is based on a series of quotes from recent literature on the subject of digital media art and music making on the World Wide Web. I begin with some basic definitions of technology and the media in the 20th century, and then go on to apply simple sociological principles to an analysis of the infrastructure and the use of digital tools in the arts. The next section investigates the political economy of the new media, applying these same principles to the Web as a platform for creating and delivering music. Finally, I refer back to La Radia, the 1930s Italian futurist dream of radio as a free and decentralized “people’s” medium, as described in the Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti and Masnata 1933), as a point of comparison with the current state of the Web. While I take a critical stance toward many uses of the Web, I do not wish to be considered a “WebLuddite”; I use the Web daily, and it is a major component of my research in computer music. I am concerned, however, by several trends that I see in the Web culture and by the expectations of its future, and I feel that it is necessary to draw attention to them.