CTImusic
News
Spring 1995
Morphoscope
Marcel Mesnage has developed a pair of programs for the Macintosh called Musinote and Morphoscope which together form a system for computer-aided music analysis. Musinote allows a user to generate a computer representation of a score via an intuitive, graphical interface. Morphoscope then takes files of the type output by Musinote and generates an object-oriented, internal data structure called a muage which can then be interrogated via a semi-programmable interface. When performing an analysis of a piece, the user can either use one of the pre-defined search-parameters or can define new ones using either simple, table definitions or more flexible, Lisp-like formula definitions. The output of an analysis is a graph of one of several types which can be printed or saved to a file.
The programs are written in Macintosh Common Lisp Version 2.0 using CLOS and users with a knowledge of Lisp can directly add functionality to the programs. A new version of the Morphoscope is currently under development by David Meredith (with Ian Cross) in the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, which should facilitate the use of the program for conducting tonal analyses and also increase the power and flexibility of the query interface.
It is intended to make the program available for research and development in U.K. Higher Education Music Departments on a non-commercial basis, subject to any restrictions on distribution that may be imposed by APDA. Further details, as and when available, from Ian Cross.
CTImusic News is © 1995 CTImusic, Lisa Whistlecroft. All rights reserved