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Common Music

What is Common Music?

Common Music (CM) is an object-oriented music composition environment. It produces sound by transforming a high-level representation of musical structure into a variety of control protocols for sound synthesis and display. Common Music defines an extensive library of compositional tools and an API through which the composer can easily modify and extend the system.

CM is released under the GNU copyleft software license. See gpl.text for information about the terms and conditions of this agreement.

Sources, runtime images and patches are available from the internet:

CCRMA FTP (ftp://ftp-ccrma.stanford.edu/pub/Lisp/cm/)

History

Common Music began in 1989 as a response to the proliferation of different audio hardware, software and computers that resulted from the introduction of low cost processors. As choices increased it became clear that composers would be well served by a system that defined a portable, powerful and consistent interface to the myriad sound rendering possibilities. Work on Common Music began in 1989 when the author was a guest composer at CCRMA, Stanford University. Most of the system as it exists today was implemented at the Institut für Musik und Akustik at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, where the author worked for five years. Common Music continues to evolve today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the author is now a professor of music composition. In 1996 Common Music received First Prize in the computer-assisted composition category at the 1er Concours International de Logiciels Musicaux in Bourges, France

Documentation

Reference
- Common Music Reference Manual
- Source Examples
Installation
- Installing CM
- Change History
Lisp Documentation

Implementation

Common Music is implemented in Common Lisp and CLOS and runs on Macintosh and I386 in the following configurations:

	Linux	Mac	Irix	Windows
ACL 5.0	x		x	x
CLISP	x		x	x
SBCL	x
CMUCL	x
MCL 4.2		x

Common Lisp Implementations:

Allegro Common Lisp (ACL): A full-featured commercial product available for Unix and 386/Windows, includes a native CLOS and a graphical interface.
CLISP: A public domain Common Lisp available for Windows and Unix. It is mostly CLTL2, includes a native CLOS. Actively supported by its authors.
SBCL: A public domain Common Lisp available for Linux. Includes a very good compiler and is actively supported.
CMUCL: A public domain Common Lisp available for Linux. Includes a very good compiler and is actively supported.
Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL): A full-featured commercial product available for Macintosh. Includes a native CLOS, true multi-processing, and a graphical interface.

Contact

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments or to tell me of any compositions you create using CM. To receive email information about CCRMA's family of Lisp music programs (CM, CLM and CMN) please join the mailing list cmdist@ccrma.stanford.edu. Sendi your request to join to cmdist-request@ccrma.stanford.edu.

Rick Taube
Associate Professor Composition/Theory
School of Music
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL
Vox: +1 (217) 244 2684
Fax: +1 (217) 355 5780
Net: taube@uiuc.edu