# The Siren Version 7.5 (2007) GUI Tour

The Siren system is a general-purpose music description and composition system; it is a collection of about 3750 Smalltalk classes for building musical applications. The current version works on VisualWorks Smalltalk running on Mac/Windows/*nix systems with MIDI, stereo audio, and OpenSoundControl I/O. The Siren release is available here.

These screen dumps were made with Siren 7.5 running on an Intel-based Apple Macintosh. Details can be found in the on-line Siren outline text, and in the on-line Siren reference manual. An earlier version of this tour (with more details) can be found here.

### Outline

- Display List Views
- Layout Manager Examples
- Time Sequence View
- Pitch/Time View
- Hauer-Steffens View
- Function View
- Sound View
- Sonogram View
- Loris Editors
- LPC Data Editors
- Launcher, Utility, and Transport Panes

### Display List Views

The example screens below show the simple Siren display list editor; it allows you to manipulate hierarchical structured graphics objects. Using pop-up menus, keyboard commands and mouse interaction uesrs can zoom and scroll, select items, and operate on them. In the first example, we're using a variant of the MS-Windows XP look-and-feel, though running nuder Mac OS X and with the Siren scroll and zoom bars.
The second starting example illustrates a different layout of the zoom and scroll widgets, and the use of another widget set. Note the selected rectangle, for which a context-sentitive menu can be used..

### Layout Managers

Siren is based on the "Navigator MVC" model; in it various kinds of layout managers take structured objects and create display lists. The two examples below (which use the Motif look-and-feel) show a class inheritance hierarchy presented first as an indented list and second as a simple tree. Color is used to denote class species relationships in the class hierarchies. A refined tree layout manage could do graphical balancing or top-down layout.

#### Return to Top

### Hauer-Steffens Notation

Hauer-Steffens view is related to piano-roll notation; the lines are placed corresponding to the accidentals or the black notes on the keyboard. The note display is done as in the pitch/time view above.

### Function View

The multi-function view allows the viewing and editing of up to 4 functions of 1 variable. The example shows linear break-point functions in red and yellow, an exponential segment function in blue, and a cubic spline function in green. The buttons along the left are for selecting a particular function for editing or file I/O.

#### Return to Top

### Sound View

The Siren sound view lets you zoom/scroll over stored sound object, and to create new sounds based on file I/O or simple synthesis algorithms. The figure below shows a frequency sweep and the editor's pop-up menu.

### Sonogram View

The sonogram view displays an fft-derived spectrum. In the example below shows a sonogram os sung Chinese speech.

###

the same with colors

### Loris Editors

Siren includes a series of tools for sound analysis/resynthesis using the time-reassigned bandwidth-enhanced partial list representation supported by Kelly Fitz's Loris package. The view below is for analysis tuning and shows (from top to bottom) the original sound, the resynthesized sound, the amplitude and frequency envelopes, and the Loris spectrum.
The simple dialog box below is for tuning the parameters of the Loris analyzer.

### LPC Editors

There are also a few new tools for editing analysis files frmo linear predictive coding (LPC) of sound. The figure below shows several smoothed versions of the pitch estimates for a segment of a speech signal.

### Siren Utility and Transport Views

A Smalltalk run-time environment usually includes a launcher view and a logging transcript, often combined into a single window, as in this view, which includes pull-down menu bar with access to all tools, tool launcher buttons, and a scrolling text field (stdout, called Transcript).
The Siren utility panel has buttons and menus for setting up Siren, and testing the external (MIDI, sound, OSC) interfaces, and for the user data load and flush functions.
The Siren transport view consists of standard transport buttons and clock counter, and a list of active scheuler clients, timers, etc. with a selection-sensitive pop-up menu for operating on them.
The buttons on the left of the transport view are hierarchical pop-up menus of user data (sounds, scores), as in this list of my sounds.
or this list of stored scores.

#### Return to Top