Tech: A good music writing program?

Subject: RE: Tech: A good music writing program?
From: GUEST,pavane
Date: 08 Jan 04 - 08:28 AM

Of course, if we are looking for a program which writes its OWN music, I think HARMONY is the only choice.

It can create randomly generated tunes in selected styles, with chords AND percussion. Sometimes they even sound passable!

(Actually, not completely random. I have enforced some structure relevant to each style)

Subject: RE: Tech: A good music writing program?
From: DMcG
Date: 08 Jan 04 - 08:35 AM

Ok. I can't resist it. Did you ever use punch cards where every hole had to be punched individually, Mark, or did you start with those new-fangled card punches where you press '@' on a keyboard and it punched all the right holes for you?

Subject: RE: Tech: A good music writing program?
From: Mark Clark
Date: 08 Jan 04 - 03:54 PM

DMcG, I used 026 and 029 key punch machines but you're probably referring to those little punches that always sat on top of one of the machines that you could slide one card into and move a punch die across it to the column you wanted, choose either a numbered or lettered zone and create a new hole. Yup, I've used those too. They were sometimes useful during program debugging because the object program was punched into binary cards—no operating system or disks—and, if you could visually "read" the binary cards, you could make some types of program corrections without having to go back to correct the source code and recompile. Of course this meant you also had to be able to code in your head in machine code.

Those were(n't) the days. <g>

      - Mark

Subject: RE: Tech: A good music writing program?
From: GUEST,pavane
Date: 09 Jan 04 - 04:12 AM

I used the old three-finger card punches.
You get to remember that 0-3-8 is a comma.
The whole of the IBM mainframe character code (Ebcdic)is based on the card codes.

For example, the use of letters to indicate negative numbers is based on the use of the 11 hole as a minus sign, but 11 plus a number gives a letter in the range J to R.

It was possible to push a piece of 'chad' (the punched-out bits) back into a hole, if you punched it wrong. Later on, we got flashy patches to stick over the holes.

If you had a large deck, you marked it with felt-tip to find out whether the operators had dropped it and not told you. That's why IBM source decks still have sequence numbers, so you can sort the cards back into order if they are dropped.

ICL used paper tape instead - but that was more difficult to amend.