Machine Tongues VIII: The Design of a Smalltalk Music System

Abstract

One way we would like to use computers is for the production of music. We can think of an orchestra as a system that produces music-various people, instruments, and sheets of music interact in welldefined ways. It would be nice if we could describe a music system to the computer directly, defining the objects and the interfaces so that they appeared similar to those of the real-world system. Smalltalk is a computer programming system whose purpose is to achieve just this sort of object and interface specification. Let us first consider an orchestra. We will describe it in terms of conductors, players, and printed sheets of music, and in terms of their interactions, such as the conductor telling the players to start to play. We can use this description of a real orchestra to identify the basic components of a Smalltalk system designed to produce music in a way very much like the real-world example.