The Siren Music and Sound Package in Smalltalk

What is Siren?

The Siren system is a general-purpose software framework for sound and music composition and production; it is a re-implementation of the Musical Object Development Environment (MODE), the software component of the Interim DynaPiano project. Siren is a collection of about 250 Smalltalk classes for building sound/music applications; it work on VisualWorks Smalltalk running on Macintosh, Windows, and UNIX-based computers with support for MIDI and audio I/O. The source code and documentation files are all available for file transfer from the directory pub/Siren on the server ftp.create.ucsb.edu (i.e., the URL of the directory is ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu/pub/Siren) or via the down-load links below.

There are several elements to Siren:

OK, but what does it sound like?

There are excerpts of my pieces on the web (also in MP3 and WAV format) here.

What files are there to down-load?

  • Siren7.2.tgz -- The Siren version 7.2 BETA tarball (source parcels, doc files, demo data, etc.).

  • Siren_Workbook.html -- The on-line doc and self-guided demo outline contents (also available as a PDF file).

  • 2003 ICMC Paper -- A brief update on recent work in Siren.
  • Siren.GUI.Tour.html -- A web-based tour of the Siren user interface tools (Squeak verison 2.3).
  • Siren.OOPSLA98.paper.pdf -- A short paper describing Siren from the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference.
  • Siren.OOPSLA98.slides.pdf -- Presentation slides from the Siren talk at the 1998 OOPSLA conference.

    • What Other Documentation is there?

    The Siren mailing list is here.

    The Siren home page is at CREATE at UCSB.

    There are several on-line Smalltalk tutorials, including here, here, and here.

    Other references to related software can be found in Stephen Pope's publication list.

    What is the Difference between the MODE and Siren?

    I tend to re-implement my tools every 5 years or so, and to rename them at that time. Since I started using Smalltalk in 1983 (or maybe it was 1984, I can't remember), I've called the tools DoubleTalk, HyperScore ToolKit, MODE, and, now, Siren. Each of these generations reflected my interest at the time, so DoubleTalk included facilities for algorithmic composition using Petri Nets and wrote score files for compilation with cmusic, while the HyperScore ToolKit supported MIDI and focused on real-time interactive composition.

    The MODE is written for ParcPlace/ObjectShare's VisualWorks/Smalltalk system, and is best suited for algorithmic composition and digital sound file mixing and processing. It was completed in 1992, and has been extended very little since then. It is still available from the CREATE FTP site and works with current VisualWorks systems.

    Siren (the name is not an acronym) is written for the VisualWorks Smalltalk system. Siren is still in-progress, but already supports MIDI I/O as well as sound synthesis and sound file processing.

    Where's More Documentation?

    Various versions and components of Siren's predecessors (The HyperScore ToolKit and the MODE) are documented in the book "The Well-Tempered Object: Musical Applications of Object-Oriented Software Technology" (S. T. Pope, ed. MIT Press, 1991), in papers in the Proceedings of the 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1996, and 1997 International Computer Music Conferences (ICMCs), in an article on the "Interim DynaPiano" in Computer Music Journal 16:3, Fall, 1992 (heartily recommended--it's also on the web), in the book Musical Signal Processing (C. Roads, S. T. Pope, G. DePoli, and A. Piccialli, eds. Swets & Zeitlinger, 1997), and in several documents on the Web page http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp/publ.html. There are more MODE- and Smoke-related documents (including several of the above references) in the directory ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Music/Doc.

    The Siren virtual image also includes an "outline" text for a brief introduction to, and self-paced demo of, the system. New users are encouraged to read and experiment with the Siren outline (the text contents of which are also included on the FTP site).

    History

    Siren and its direct predecessors stem from music systems that developed in the process of my composition. Of the early ancestors, ARA was an outgrowth of the Lisp system used for Bat out of Hell (1983); DoubleTalk was based on the Smalltalk-80-based Petri net editing system used for Requiem Aeternam dona Eis (1986); the HyperScore ToolKit's various versions were used (among others) for Day (1988), and the MODE was developed to realize Kombination XI (1990) and Paragraph 36: All Gates are Open (1993). In each of these cases, some amount of effort was spent-after the completion of the composition-to make the tools more general-purpose, often making them less useful for any particular task. Siren--a re-implementation of the MODE undertaken in 1997-8--is based on the representations and tools I'm using in the realization of Ywe Ye, Yi Jr Di (in progress). If Siren works well for other composers, it is because of its idiosyncratic approach, rather than its attempted generality.
     

    Go to the Siren FTP Site

    [Stephen Travis Pope, stp@create.ucsb.edu]

    Created: 1997.11.08; LastEditDate: 2003.12.23