The Interim DynaPiano: An Integrated Hardware/Software Tool and 
		Instrument for Composers

Stephen Travis Pope
	The Nomad Group, Computer Music Journal, CCRMA
	P. O. Box 60632, Palo Alto, California 94306 USA
	stp@CCRMA.Stanford.edu

Abstract

The Interim DynaPiano (IDP) is an integrated computer hardware/software 
configuration for music composition, production, and performance based on 
a Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARCstation computer and the Musical Object 
Development Environment (MODE) software. 

The IDP SPARCstation is a powerful hardware-accelerated color graphics 
RISC- (reduced instruction set computer) based workstation computer 
running the UNIX operating system. It is augmented by large RAM and disk 
memories, and coprocessors and interfaces for real-time sampled sound 
and MIDI command I/O. 

The MODE is a large hierarchy of object-oriented software components for 
music written in the Smalltalk-80 language and programming system. 
MODE software applications in IDP support flexible structured music 
composition, sampled sound recording and processing, and real-time music 
performance using MIDI or sampled sounds.

The motivation for the development of IDP is to build a powerful, 
flexible, and portable computer-based composer's tool and musical 
instrument that is affordable by a professional composer (i.e., around 
the price of a good piano or MIDI studio). 
The hardware and low-level software of the system consist entirely of 
off-the-shelf commercial components. 
The goal of the high-level and application software is to exhibit good 
object-oriented design principles and elegant modern software engineering 
practice. 
The basic configuration of the system is consistent with a whole series 
of "intelligent composer's assistants" based on a core technology that 
has been stable for a decade. 

This article presents an overview of the hardware and software components 
of the current IDP system. The background section discusses several of 
the design issues in IDP in terms of definitions and a set of examples 
from the literature. The hardware system configuration is described next, 
and the rest of the article introduces the MODE signal and event 
representations, software libraries, and application examples.

The accompanying demonstration will outline the current IDP hardware 
configuration (as demonstrated), and show the graphical user interfaces 
of several of the MODE applications including the use of the real-time
sampled sound and MIDI interfaces.

The documentation for the IDP project, and the MODE software itself, 
are all available freely via anonymous Internet ftp from the the network
files named  anonymous@ccrma-stp.stanford.edu:/pub/st80/MODE*".

stp@CCRMA.Stanford.edu
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