OpenMusic introduction - CIEE program 2014

OpenMusic is available for free on MacOSX, Windows and Linux platform. Download and install the last OM version from Ircam ForumNet website (Mac/Windows), or on the Ircam forge portal (Linux + intermediate beta releases).

I recommend participants to create a ForumNet account (it's free).

⇒ Once you have a Forumnet account you can also subscribe to the OpenMusic users group.

⇒ You can also subscribe (even non-Forum members) to the OM mailing list to get support, advices and share your experience and problems with the OM user community and developers. [The use of this list tends to decrease and seems progressively replaced by the Forum]

If this is your first installation, you will may to setup a MIDI support. The default MIDI system is selected in the OM MIDI preferences. MidiShare is the default library used by OM to manage MIDI data and rendering.
Mac users: You need to install MidiShare yourself. Depending on your OS configuration, Midishare 1.92 may be required instead of 1.93 (latest).

If you wish to explore OM by yourself, you may find help at the following different places:

• The online user manual (also accessible in OM from the Help menu) is a relatively complete documentation about all features and programming concepts of the OM environment.
  Note that this manual does not include external libraries ⇒ check this page out for the libraries.
• The function and class reference is accessible in OM from the Help menu and provides a basic documentation of all referenced objects and functions. Type 'd' in an OM patch to access directly the reference page corresponding to a selected box.
• In patch and other OM editors, the Editor command keys in the help menu (also accessible with 'H' keyboard shortcut), can be a useful reminder of the principal actions and shortcuts.
• See the Common Lisp specs. and reference for the Lisp tools and functions. (The book Practical Common Lisp – available online – is also a good ressource to get a general introduction to Lisp).
• Check/ask questions on the ForumNet OpenMusic disciussion group or to the OM mailing list.

Errors in OM can be raised by mistakes in your patches or Lisp code or bugs of the environment. OM tries to handle an report errors as much as possible, but can fail in certain situations (external library crashes, memory issues, etc.)

• A system Terminal pop-up is not necessarily dangerous. It happens when an error was not "catched" correctly in OM and can be useful to track the origin of this error. Try to type :b to know more/report the error, or :top to return to the top level and get the control back on the OM user interface. Do not forget to save your work. Consider a fresh restart.
• When a box can not draw anymore because of a wrong input and a message errors appears every time you click or redisplay: hide the "miniview", by selecting the window and typing upper case 'M' (show/hide all front window miniviews). Delete the box and create a new one, just to be sure..
• When an evaluation seems never to end (Listener printing "Running" forever): Try to abort the process (Listener window, menu Lisp/Abort or CMD+'A').

⇒ Download the patches

• Click to enlarge the pictures
• See how to import patches in your workspace in the online user manual.

1-chord-seq: In this first patch we have created a CHORD starting from a random pitch (om-random) and a list on intervals, using om+ to add the intervals. We have repeated this process (repeat-n) in order to produce a list of pitches and instantiate a CHORD-SEQ object, and then a MULTI-SEQ object. Onset and durations are generated from another random list of values. dx→x was used to convert the list of random durations into a list of absolute onsets. The eval-once mode avoids to recompute a new random list several times and keep onsets ad durations in line.
2-bpf: We see how to use (om-sample, om-spline…) BPF objects, and convert them into initialization values for CHORD-SEQ objects (om-scale, om-round…)
3-voice: The VOICE object allows to play with standard music notation. It uses a tree representation to deal with rhythmic structures, which can be manipulated in the VOICE editor or produced in the patch. The omquantify tool allows to convert absolute (ms) durations into a rhythm tree. See how to edit rhythms in the editor (and more) in the OM user manual.
4-chord-multiplication: the chord multiplication process implemented here consists in applying the intervals in a chord (obtained with x→dx) to the pitches of another chord. We iterate on the pitches using MAPCAR and a patch set in mode lambda.
5-interpolations-and-mapcar: The interpolation computes an number of intermediate values between two given lists of values. We convert these interpolated lists in BPF using MAPCAR and a simple lambda patch and display the results in BPF-LIBs. The mat-trans tool provides an orthogonal view of the interpolation process.
6-big-patch: this is the "main patch" of our session. On the left part, we start from a BPF and apply to the y-values an iteration (mapcar) adding constant intervals to each pitch. On the right, the MAPCAR and the lambda patch have additional free inputs that are iterated through, in order to 1) get the base pitches from the BPF; 2) apply intervals to each successive pitches (x→dx,dx→x), and 3) apply a "chord density" filter (first-n) starting from a value picked in another BPF. The gen-chord sub-patch produces pitches by an interpolation process between to manually input chords.
7-sound-analysis: In this patch we used SDIFFILE objects containing sound analysis data generated in Audiosculpt or in OM using a SOUND the functions from the OM-pm2 library. We extract chord-sequences from partial tracking or chord-seq analysis. This patch can be used as a replacement of gen-chord in the previous patch. ⇒ Read more on the SDIF format and use in OM in the online user manual.