Introduction to compose: An editor and interpreter for automated score generation and score processing

Abstract

An exposition of COMPOSE, a Macintosh environment for automated composition. COMPOSE greatly extends the paradigms of Koenig's PROJECT 2 by supplying a library of score‐generation and score‐processing units which users can link together as they please. Complementing these are facilities for manipulating ‘precompositional’ material such as rhythm and pitch series and for describing compositional parameters that evolve gradually over time. The implementation is at a very high level; units are just as content operating upon vectors and trees as they are operating on scalar values. By configuring a score‐processing network appropriately, one can realize any number of formalized compositional procedures including total serialism, much of the Schillinger System, Forte‐style set manipulations, stochastic music, statistical procedures, Markov chains, and Chomsky grammars.