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From: mab@druco.ATT.COM (Alan Bland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Keynote (was Re: MIDI programming using midi.library)
Message-ID: <6904@drutx.ATT.COM>
Date: 7 Dec 90 18:01:42 GMT
References: <9725@fy.sei.cmu.edu> <1990Dec4.134944.16669@cbnewsl.att.com> <4745@cvl.umd.edu> <34068@netnews.upenn.edu>
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Reply-To: mab@druco.ATT.COM (Alan Bland)
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In article <34068@netnews.upenn.edu> nichomax@cattell.psych.upenn.edu (Nicholas Maxwell) writes:
>What's the language in which you must program keynote?  C?
>
>nichomax@cattell.psych.upenn.edu

The language itself is called Keynote, and is a derivative of AWK (a C-like
language available on UNIX).  Keynote is an interpreted language, so you
don't have to go through the edit-compile-link-run cycle.  As such you get
immediate feedback on changes you make at the expense of some overhead
during execution.  It's terrific for musical "hacking!"

The language includes some very powerful constructs for manipulating
phrases of MIDI notes.  For example,

	ph = 'c,d,e,f,g'

sets the phrase variable ph to contain the first five notes of a C-major
scale.  To transpose the pitch of phrase up an octave (12 tones), just type

	ph.pitch += 12

You can play the phrase backwards by

	reverse(ph)

Included below is the actual Keynote code to the "reverse" function so you
can get a feel for what the language is like.  Keynote comes with hundreds
of functions like this, and of course you can write your own.


	func reverse(ph, leng,nt,r)
	{
		if ( nargs() == 0 ) {
			print "usage: reverse(phrase)"
			return '';
		}
		leng = ph.length
		r = ''
		for ( nt in ph ) {
			nt.time = leng - nt.time - nt.dur
			r |= nt
		}
		return r;
	}

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-- Alan Bland
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