Making Music with a Joy Stick

A new program turns composing into a videogame

Will Harvey, 16 and an honors student from Foster City, Calif., was singing in his high school choir one day when the idea came to him. His family did not own a piano, and he had taken no music lessons, but he thought of a simple way for people like him to learn music with a computer. Drawing on his considerable talents as a programmer, Harvey sat down with his Apple and an introductory music text and came up with a program that is making even professional musicians stand up and shout "Bravo!" Not only did Harvey master the mechanics of music composition, he made them vastly more accessible by putting them under the control of the joy stick of a home computer.

In his Music Construction Set (MCS) program ($40 for the Apple II, with Atari and Commodore 64 versions to come), the joy stick controls a movable hand on the video screen that picks up notes, sharps, clef signs and other music symbols, and sets them down on a staff. At any time, the computer will play them back so the user can hear how they sound. Up to 1,400 symbols can be displayed on two staffs, from whole notes to 1/32 notes, from simple melodies to six-voice chords.

Harvey's program is not the first to take advantage of the microcomputer's power to create and store synthesized sound. There are at least a dozen similar products on the market, from Apple's $45 Musicomp, to alphaSyntauri's $1,995 Computer Music System, which includes full keyboard, 3,000-note memory and 16-track recording system. But no other low-cost music program makes it so easy to do so much. The key to the software's success is what the industry calls its "user interface." It avoids computerese and makes notation as simple and transparent as possible. To play the notes, the user simply points at a picture of a piano. To return to the top of a piece, he points at a picture of a home. Key signatures can be selected and music automatically transposed with the press of a button. A pair of on-screen scissors will cut out up to nine measures of music, and a little pastepot symbol will paste them down again.

"It took me about three seconds to decide I wanted it," says W.M. ("Trip") Hawkins, president of Electronic Arts, the software publishing house handling Harvey's program. Hawkins calls MCS an example of software that is "simple, hot and deep," by which he means it is easy to use, appeals to the senses, and will hold the interest of the user, no matter how sophisticated he becomes. Jeanie Chandler, a professional flutist and music teacher from Marin County in Northern California, who was hired by Electronic Arts as a consultant on the project, says she is using MCS to play her piano accompaniments while she rehearses for an upcoming flute recital.

MCS is not without its flaws. To improve on the tinny speaker that comes installed in an Apple, users must invest an additional $100 for a plug-in sound-effects generator called a Mockingboard. (The Atari and Commodore versions will play three and four voices without any additional equipment.) Serious composers will find that the program's 1,400-symbol capacity allows them to write only about 70 measures at a time, requiring them to print out long pieces in sections. Moreover, using the program at full capacity causes the tempo of the machine to slow down, while short pieces whip by too fast for the eye to follow in detail.

Even with these caveats, experts who have seen Harvey's program think it may prove to be one of those rare pieces of software that open up the computer market to a new class of consumer. "It's both educational and entertaining," says Michele Preston, an analyst at L.E Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin in New York City. In fact, the program seems to be as versatile and competent as its creator. Harvey, a blond-haired Eagle Scout, not only tinkers with computers but holds down a 4.0 average at Uplands High School, played halfback on city football teams, twice took first-place honors in physics at the San Francisco Science Fair, and was elected president of the Uplands student body. He is thinking of becoming a lawyer. Says he: "My personal philosophy is to do as many things as possible as best I can." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.