Hierarchical Music Specification Language

The Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL) is a music programming language written in the 1980s by Larry Polansky, Phil Burk, and David Rosenboom at Mills College. Written on top of Forth, it allowed for the creation of real-time interactive music performance systems, algorithmic composition software, and any other kind of program that requires a high degree of musical informatics. It was distributed by Frog Peak Music, and runs with a very light memory footprint (~1 megabyte) on Macintosh and Amiga systems.

Unlike CSound and other languages for audio synthesis, HMSL is primarily a language for making music. As such, it interfaces with sound-making devices through built-in MIDI classes. However, it has a high degree of built-in understanding of music performance practice, tuning systems, and score reading. Its main interface for the manipulation of musical parameters is through the metaphor of shapes, which can be created, altered, and combined to create a musical texture, either by themselves or in response to real-time or scheduled events in a score.

HMSL has been widely used by composers working in algorithmic composition for over twenty years. In addition to the authors (who are also composers), HMSL has been used in pieces by Nick Didkovsky, The Hub, James Tenney, Tom Erbe, and Pauline Oliveros.

A Java port of HMSL was developed by Nick Didkovsky under the name JMSL, and is designed to interface to the JSyn API.

External links

Computer music

People	Marc Battier Richard Boulanger David Cope John Chowning Giuseppe di Giugno Charles Dodge Gottfried Michael Koenig Paul Lansky Max Mathews Miller Puckette Roger Reynolds Jean-Claude Risset Curtis Roads Laurie Spiegel The Hub Trimpin Barry Vercoe Iannis Xenakis

Programs and instruments	Cmix Csound HMSL Kyma Max/MSP MIDI controller Pure Data Music Mouse MUSIC-N Radiodrum SuperCollider UPIC

Places	Bell Labs CCRMA CEMAMu Computer Music Center at Columbia IRCAM Princeton Sound Lab Oberlin TIMARA Labs

Techniques	Algorithmic composition Sound synthesis

Compositions	Illiac Suite Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, November 01, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.