Music4

MUSIC4 was a computer music synthesis software package written by Max Mathews. The program was an expansion of earlier packages written by Mathews to produce music by direct digital computation, which could be heard by converting samples to audible sound using a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). MUSIC4 was further expanded by Godfrey Winham and Hubert Howe into MUSIC4B, and then into MUSIC4BF, a more portable version written in FORTRAN. It is a precursor to CSound.

MUSIC4 allows the programmer to enter a musical score as a text file and have each note played with a particular "musical instrument", which is a software algorithm. Some instruments are supplied in the package, but the programmer can supply new instruments in the form of FORTRAN code, to be compiled and called by the MUSIC4 package to generate output.

As designed, the package was not intended for real-time generation of music as is done by a modern portable electronic keyboard instrument; instead, entire songs or musical pieces are encoded and processed into a digital file on disk or tape containing the stream of samples. Prior to the advent of low-cost digital audio gear in the late 1980s, the samples were typically sent to a DAC and recorded on analog tape.

See also

• MUSIC-N