The Music Kit was a software package for the
NeXT Computer
NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of , aimed at the high ...
system. First developed by
David A. Jaffe and
Julius O. Smith, it supported the
Motorola 56001 DSP that was included on the NeXT Computer's motherboard. It was also the first architecture to unify the
Music-N and
MIDI
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...
paradigms. Thus it combined the generality of the former with the interactivity and performance capabilities of the latter. The Music Kit was integrated with the Sound Kit.
First demonstrated in 1988 at
Davies Symphony Hall, the 1.0 release shipped in 1989 with the
NeXT
NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later develope ...
computer and included an
Objective-C
Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...
library for creating music and sound applications, a score language that included expression evaluation, MIDI, sound and DSP drivers, several command-line utilities and a simple score-playing application called ScorePlayer. The Music Kit was integrated into a variety of music applications, including
Finale and Creation Station. It was also used in video games and even document processors.
The 2.0 release of the NeXT computer included additional bundled applications, including Ensemble, a fractal-based improvisation tool developed by Michael Mcnabb. Others involved in the NeXT Music Kit project included Douglas Fulton (documentation and demos), Doug Keislar (third-party support), Greg Kellogg (drivers), Lee Boynton (drivers, Sound Kit) and Dana Massie (development.) In addition, consultants brought in early on included Andy Moorer (DSP software architecture), Roger Dannenberg (data structures) and John Strawn (DSP software).
In 1992 (NeXT 3.0 release), the Music Kit was un-bundled from the NeXT software and was released as a copyrighted open source package to the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (
CCRMA), where Julius O. Smith was a professor. Stanford University hired David A. Jaffe as a consultant to continue to develop the Music Kit. Among the additions at that time were support for the Airel QuintProcessor, a five-DSP board for the
NeXTcube
The NeXTcube is a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT from 1990 to 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and is housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure, designed by frog design ...
, support for audio directly via the DSP56001 serial port (which was brought out to the back of the NeXT cube), and support for
NextSTEP
NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its ...
and the use of DSP processing using the
Turtle Beach DSP56001 card. A set of eight Motorola evaluation boards were combined into a chassis for the prototype "Frankenstein" platform, used by the Sondius program of the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing to develop physical models of musical instruments. In addition, Jaffe was hired by a third party to add
MIDI time code support to the Music Kit. (The Sondius group was later spun off into an independent company, Staccato Systems, Inc., with funding from Yamaha and Stanford University. Staccato Systems, Inc. was acquired by
Analog Devices
Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), also known simply as Analog, is an American multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion, signal processing, and power management technology, headquartered in Wilming ...
in 2000.)
The Music Kit was described in numerous articles in NeXTWorld and other periodicals, and in books such as ''The Complete Guide to the Nextstep user environment''.
More recent ports of the Music Kit were done by Leigh Smith and Stephen Brandon.
References
External links
*{{cite web, url=http://musickit.sourceforge.net, title=The MusicKit V5.6.2, website=Musickit.sourceforge.net, accessdate=24 May 2018
NeXT