A music synthesis system using a personal computer, drum sensor, and MIDI-controlled synthesizer
D. Bart, J. Kohut, M. V. Mathews · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
A music synthesis system has been built. It consists of an AT&T 6300 computer connected to a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer and to an electronic drum sensor on which the performer plays. With the exception of the electronic drum, all components in the system can be purchased, the total cost being about $5000. Device driver and interrupt handler programs have been written to interface the computer with the synthesizer and sensor hardware. A real-time control program, RTLET, has been written. In RTLET a set of real-time control processes are activated by sending dated letters between processes. A postmaster program, responsible for overall timing, receives and delivers letters to a control process and activates the process at the date time specified on the letter. RTLET has been used to implement conductor control processes in which the performer controls the playing of a score stored in the computer memory by means of drum strokes.