Abstract:

The Smallmusic Object Kernel (SmOKe) is an object-oriented representation, description language and interchange format for musical parameters, events, and structures. The author believes this representation, and its proposed linear ASCII description, to be well-suited as a basis for: (1) concrete description interfaces in other languages, (2) specially-designed binary storage and interchange formats, and (3) use within and between interactive multimedia, hypermidia applications in several application domains.

The textual versions of SrnOKe share the terseness of note-list-oriented music input languages, the flexibility and extensibility of "real" music programming languages, and the non-sequential description and annotation features of hypermedia description formats. This description presents the requirements and motivations for the design of the representation language, defines its basic concepts and constructs, and presents examples of the music magnitudes and event structures. The intended audience for this discussion is programmers and rnusicians working with digital-technology-based multimedia tools who are interested in the design issues related to music representations, and are familiar with the basic concepts of software engineering. Two other documents ([Smalimusic 1992] and [Pope 19921), describe the SmOKe language, and the MODE environment within which it has been implemented, in more detail.