Here is a copy of a Music Mouse review that appeared in Amazing Computing. Chris Hardin green!chris cbnewsk!chardin (404) 750-8921 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A review of Music Mouse Reprinted without permission from Amazing Computing Vol 3, Num 4, 1988 By J. Henry Lowengard I first learned about Music Mouse from a review in Ear Magazine (June '86). I was so interseted, I actually bought a copy -- even though I didn't have a Macintosh to run it on! (All right I gave it to my brother to run on his Mac plus). Now more than a year has passed, and after many betas version and creeping features, the Amiga port has been released, marketed by Opcode Systems as their initial entry in the Amiga community. What a port! Music Mouse has been adapted and expanded in its Amiga version, with much attention paid to Amiga-related concerns such as fine full- color graphics, multi-tasking, and IFF sound files. It even installs itself as a module in Mimetic's SoundScape patch panel! So what is Music Mouse? "You can't play 'Home on the Range' with it," says Laurie Spiegel. Music Mouse is a high- level software-based musical instrument. If you take a wide view of music, you will realize that Music Mouse itself is a composition (somewhere in the genre of "process music"). It reacts to the mouses position and a few dozen parameters to either play internal sounds or send MIDI data. More precisely, the mouse position selects a chord voicing from any of seven built-in scales, then plays it according to settings for arpeggiation patterns, decay length, loudness, and MIDI. The aforementioned scales are Chromatic, Diatonic, Middle-Eastern, Pentatonic, Fourths, Octotonic, and Non- Quantized; they may be transposed into any key. The patterns interact with the mouse position and pattern transformation settings to produce four notes. The selected notes are then ordered into a short musical phrase, and finally, played on the internal voices, MIDI devices, or both (or neither -- one may mute any or all voices). The result is a flow of chords or arpeggios controlled by mouse movements. Music Mouse uses the computer keyboard as a control panel, which means you don't have to fish for menus or gadgets very often. The menus clue you in on the various functions, and a copyable cheat sheet is provided to help you out until you memorize the keyboard layout. The manual tells you about each function in detail, and explains the reasoning behind the various groupings of keys. All the menus, by the way, sport drop-shadowed lettering, which I recommend to all developers. If you acquire other software packages, or new MIDI synthesizers, mixers, effects racks and what-not, Music Mouse grows in power. It makes an imaginative MIDI controller, creating understandable, unexpected effects while you shape the general contours of the composition. The program is quite accommodating and obviously carefully designed: the manual even gives a few tips on how to take advantage of certain synth's power, and it has menu entries which accommodate the quirks of the CZ-101 and the Mirage. MIDI is accommodated via a serial- to-MIDI converter, such as the ECE MIDI, MIDI Gold, or Mimetics' interface. The Amiga's internal sounds need not be left out of the orchestration. Music Mouse uses standard IFF 8SVX formatted files with no funny extensions (i.e., ".sample" or ".snd") as internal sound material. The program comes with 24 samples in its Sounds directory. The four Amiga voices may be independently loaded with any of these sounds, using a snappy file requester. You can use sounds made for other Amiga music programs with Music Mouse, and pre-select the ones to be loaded when the program is started. As you discover the effects certain keystrokes have on various sample combinations, you will find that even without the aid of MIDI, the Amiga can do its awesome best. And thanks to multitasking, you can run a slide show or animation on top of it while it plays (memory permitting). The manual, also written by Laurie Spiegel, is very thorough, and unlike some other ports I have seen, it's brand new and Amiga specific. Since the Amiga version is currently the more powerful of the two, this is helpful. (Mac readers take heart! Your version will be upgraded next, with even more features and controls than before!) The manual also covers some aspects of the philosophy behind Music Mouse, and by extension, the whole subject of computer-aided composition in real-time. You can use it to ear-train yourself it find the movements underneath the melodic patterns and harmonies found in other music. One of the very big problems with computer-based performance is that it is not very interesting to look at. Often the operator comes out, turns it on, and assumes a grim visage while the audience squirms. Amiga Music Mouse provides eight- color display which can be "played" in synch with the music. For example, the colored bars may be "stamped" on the screen (Deluxe Video terminology) and color cycled. Each of the eight colors may be set interactively from the keyboard. Turning down colors 6 and 7 removes the logos and keyboard images, leaving you to groove on the Video Vibes. While not as psychedelic as Polyscope, the effects give the audiences and performers something to look at and hum their mantras to. Admittedly, the mouse is not an ideal music controller. It has only two degrees of freedom. Even when augmented by the keyboard, it takes some practice (as all instruments do) to understand which gestures cause which music events. On the other hand, since my "mouse" is a modified trackball, I can control it with my feet while playing some other instrument. I can also report that, using internal sounds only, it runs perfectly from a Kurta Series 1 digitizing pad (the Series 1 uses the serial port). Because of the intentional randomness of sequences, its output is a good basis for improvisation. Music Mouse is copy protected, using the original disk as a key. Even Marauder II won't copy this key successfully, so you're out of luck if you want to run uniterruptedly from a RAM: or hard disk. Music Mouse (Mac) has been widely pirated, and the two authors could really use the royalties. If you make a copy for customization purposes, be sure to rename the disk so Music Mouse won't confuse it with the key disk and become Music Guru. I have found two inaccuracies so far with the program and the manual: 1) The Title screen has the old address for Opcode Systems, which I will not discuss here. 2) The method for pre- loading sounds is slightly more powerful now. Music Mouse looks in the S: directory (where Startup-Sequence hides) for a file named MMInitSounds. This file contains, in order, the directory name for the Initial sounds on the top line, then the name of the sound file to be loaded for each of the four voices, each on separate lines. You can get a clue to this file's existence in the S: directory if you use the Save gadget in the Amiga voices requestor. It would also be nice to save and restore entire configurations in a file, should you happen upon the Lost Chord. I mentioned that it can install itself in SoundScape's patch panel, where you may connect it to the "Tape Deck" or rechannel it's MIDI output. Music Mouse either transmits all information on channel 1 or puts each voice on channels 1 to 4. It can also take its "Clock ticks" from SoundScape, and by extension, from an external drum machine. When SoundScape is activated from Music Mouse, the Mouse screen glides down to reveal the Workbench-based SoundScape windows. If you connect your MIDI out to its own MIDI in, you can fool a concurrently running copy of Deluxe Music into reading "MIDI events" and insert them into a human-legible score. (This trick comes directly from the manual!) Those with lots of extra memory can DMCS, SoundScape, and Music Mouse simultaneously and patch them together. (Now you know what multitasking is good for!) You can also run Music Mouse with copies of itself, although this only makes sense when using MIDI, since the internal sounds would be used up by the first copy. Those of us with even more memory like to run an infestation of Music Mice. Internally, Music Mouse sleeps most of the time, wakes up to play its notes and find out what's new, and then goes to sleep again. This makes for trouble-free multitasking. Music Mouse will soon be joined by other programs with similar aims, such as "M" from Intelligent Music and "Hierarchical Music Specification Language" (HMSL), a musical JForth extension from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (415-430-2191). Its a little odd that programs like this are surfacing before any commercial MIDI patch editors, but it may also mean that the ebb tide in Amiga music software is turning. Music Mouse (c) 1986, 1987 by Laurie Spiegel and David Silver List Price: $79.00 Opcode Systems 1024 Hamilton Ct. Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 321-8977 About the author: J. Henry Lowengard is an active member of Amuse, the New York Amiga User's Group and the author of some half-baked Amiga software (DXFER, LYR, DRW ...), which is available in the public domain.