OpenMusic (OM) is an object-oriented visual programming environment for musical composition based on

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fr ...

. It may also be used as an all-purpose visual interface to Lisp programming. At a more specialized level, a set of provided classes and libraries make it a very convenient environment for music composition.

History

OpenMusic is the last in a series of computer-assisted composition software designed at IRCAM. Versions of OpenMusic are currently available for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

(

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

has been released under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

( LGPL).

Programming in OpenMusic

Programs in OpenMusic are created by connecting together (a process known as 'patching') either pre-defined or user-defined modules, in a similar manner to graphical signal-processing environments such as Max/MSP or Pd. Unlike such environments, however, the result of an OpenMusic computation will typically be displayed in conventional music notation, which can then be directly manipulated, if so required, via an editor. A substantial body of specialized libraries has been contributed by users, which extends OpenMusic's functionality into such areas as

constraint programming Constraint programming (CP) is a paradigm for solving combinatorial problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, and operations research. In constraint programming, users declaratively state th ...

aleatoric composition Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word ''alea'', meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to t ...

spectral music Spectral music uses the acoustic properties of sound – or sound spectra – as a basis for composition. Definition Defined in technical language, spectral music is an acoustic musical practice where compositional decisions are often infor ...

, minimalist music, music theory,

fractals In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as ill ...

, music information retrieval, sound synthesis etc.

Composers using OpenMusic

* Alain Bancquart *

Brian Ferneyhough Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and ...

* Joshua Fineberg *

Karim Haddad Karim Haddad ( ar, كريم حداد) (born January 22, 1962 in Dar-el Mraisseh, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese composer. Education He achieved his first musical studies at the National Conservatory of Beirut. He received B.A. of Philosophy an ...

Rozalie Hirs Rozalie Hirs (born 7 April 1965) is a Dutch composer of contemporary classical music and a poet. The principal concerns of her work are the adventure of listening, reading, and the imagination. Biography Rozalie Hirs studied piano and voice from ...

* Eres Holz * Michael Jarrell *

Fabien Lévy Fabien Lévy (born 11 December 1968) is a French composer. Biography Lévy was born in Paris, France. After having been a jazz pianist, he studied composition with Gérard Grisey, orchestration with Marc–André Dalbavie and ethnomusicology w ...

* Magnus Lindberg * Fang Man * Philippe Manoury *

Tristan Murail Tristan Murail (born 11 March 1947) is a French composer associated with the " spectral" technique of composition. Among his compositions is the large orchestral work ''Gondwana''. Early life and studies Murail was born in Le Havre, France. His f ...

* Kaija Saariaho * Marco Stroppa

References

OpenMusic : Un langage visuel pour la composition musicale assistée par ordinateur
Carlos Agon, PhD Thesis, IRCAM—Univ. Paris 6. * ''The OM Composer's Book 1'', ed. Carlos Agon, Gérard Assayag and Jean Bresson, 2006, Editions Delatour/IRCAM; . *
The OM Composer's Book 2
', ed. Jean Bresson, Carlos Agon and Gérard Assayag, 2008, Editions Delatour/IRCAM. *

', ed. Jean Bresson, Carlos Agon and Gérard Assayag, 2016, Editions Delatour/IRCAM.
Fabio Selvafiorita's Thesis
in Italian, Selvafiorita, Fabio, .
Composition assistée par ordinateur : techniques et outils de programmation visuelle pour la création musicale
Jean Bresson, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 2017.

External links

OpenMusic Homepage
with full OM class and function reference, tutorials and instructions on building OM from source.
Audio programming languages Common Lisp (programming language) software Visual programming languages {{Compu-lang-stub