OpenMusic (OM) is an object-oriented visual programming environment for

musical composition Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called ...

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 fro ...

. 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 IRCAM (French: ''Ircam, '', English: Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is ...

. 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 (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

(

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 Inc., App ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

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 serv ...

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 ...

. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

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 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 ...

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 Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, per ...

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,

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 informe ...

minimalist music In visual arts, Minimal music, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimal ...

music theory Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (ke ...

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 illus ...

music information retrieval Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicol ...

sound synthesis A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and f ...

etc.

Composers using OpenMusic

Alain Bancquart Alain Bancquart (20 June 1934 – 27 January 2022) was a French composer. Biography Bancquart had his musical formation at the Conservatoire de Paris (violin, viola, chamber music, counterpoint, fugue and composition) with Darius Milhaud. He wa ...

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 Joshua Fineberg (born July 26, 1969) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. Biography Joshua Fineberg was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He began his musical studies at the age of five. He completed his undergraduate studies a ...

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 and ...

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 fro ...

Eres Holz Eres Holz (born September 26, 1977 in Rehovot), is a German composer of Israeli origin. He has been living in Germany since 2003. Life Biography Holz studied composition with Ruben Seroussi in Tel Aviv. From 2003 to 2011 he studied composition ...

Michael Jarrell Michael Jarrell (born 8 October 1958) is a Swiss composer and academic teacher, whose operas, such as '' Cassandre'', have been performed internationally. Life Born in Geneva, Jarrell studied at the Geneva Conservatoire, and later with Klaus H ...

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 wi ...

Magnus Lindberg Magnus Gustaf Adolf Lindberg (born 27 June 1958) is a Finnish composer and pianist. He was the New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence from 2009 to 2012 and has been the London Philharmonic Orchestra's composer-in-residence since the begin ...

* Fang Man *

Philippe Manoury Philippe Manoury (born 19 June 1952) is a French composer. Biography Manoury was born in Tulle and began composition studies at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris with Gérard Condé and Max Deutsch. He continued his studies from 1974 to ...

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 fa ...

Kaija Saariaho Kaija Anneli Saariaho (; ; born 14 October 1952) is a Finnish composer based in Paris, France. During the course of her career, Saariaho has received commissions from the Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet and from IRCAM for the Ensemble Inter ...

Marco Stroppa Marco Stroppa (born 8 December 1959, in Verona) is an Italian composer who writes computer music as well as music for instruments with live electronics. Biography Marco Stroppa studied piano, composition, choral direction and electronic music at ...

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