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About_HMSL
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HMSL, the Hierarchical Music Specification Language
HMSL is an experimental programming language that is an
extension to Forth. It was developed at the Center for
Contemporary Music at Mills College by Phil Burk, Larry
Polansky, and David Rosenboom. It is distributed by Frog Peak
Music.
HMSL, the Hierarchical Music Specification Language, is a
programming language for experimental music composition and
performance. It is an object oriented set of extensions to the
Forth language that runs on the Macintosh (Plus , SE and II) and
Amiga computers with 1 Meg or more of RAM. HMSL includes tools
for exploring algorithmic composition, intelligent real time
instrument design, and musical cognition and perception. It
also provides a complete MIDI toolbox including a MIDI parser
that can give a programmed response to any MIDI input event.
HMSL is used by a number of composers who want to explore the
uncharted regions of music. It has been used for everything
from enhancing keyboard performance, to interspecies
communication experiments, to controlling kinetic sculptures, to
generating music based on fractals.
HMSL provides a number of classes of musical objects including
one that allows you to treat musical parameters as abstract
numeric "shapes". Shapes can represent melodies, profiles of
harmonic complexity, intervals or any other user defined
parameter. These shapes can be edited graphically while being
performed. Shapes are played by objects called Players that
provide very flexible real time scheduling. Players use objects
called Instruments that output the shape data in some way,
either as music, or text or graphics, or ... Players can be
assembled with other Players in Parallel or Sequential
Collections. Collections can also contain other Collections to
build very complex hierarchical pieces. One can also place
Productions and Jobs in the hierarchy which will execute user
written routines.
An additional real time performance environment, called Perform,
allows you to turn on or off, or change the priority of
Actions. Actions are customizable objects that have a
programmed response to a programmed stimulus. This environment
can be used for complex performance "webs".
The Amiga version also provides a toolbox for local sound
generation, IFF sample playback and editing, and alternate
tunings based on ratios or precalculated periods.
Use of HMSL requires some software programming skills, however,
an extensive manual, tutorial, and many sample pieces are
included to help people get started. HMSL comes in source code
form and must be compiled. HMSL costs $150.00.
Frog Peak Music
P.O. Box 9911
Oakland, CA
94613
(415) 461-1442
Bitnet: phil@mills.berkeley.edu