MUSIC4 allows the Programmer to enter a musical score as a Text File and have each note played with a particular " Instrument ", which is a software algorithm. Some instruments are supplied in the package, but the programmer can supply new instruments in the form of FORTRAN code, to be Compile d and called by the MUSIC4 package to generate output.
As designed, the package was not intended for real-time generation of music as is done by a modern portable Electronic Keyboard instrument; instead, entire songs or musical pieces are encoded and processed into a digital file on disk or tape containing the stream of samples. Prior to the advent of low-cost digital audio gear in the late 1980's, the samples were typically sent to a DAC and recorded on analog tape.
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