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Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)

Website: Werner Icking Music Archive

The recent history of the Werner Icking Music Archive. Icking and several colleagues developed a music-printing capability that was modeled on the TeX metafont and typesetting system. He built an online capability for users to share scores they had edited and typeset themselves. In many cases this included full sets of parts. Some editions were arrangements. MusiTeX (and related dialects) were often traded within the community, but some of the contributions predated the widespread use of the internet. After Icking's death (2001), his archive was administered by a contributor, Christian Mondrup. In 2011-12 it was amalgamated with the IMSLP aggregation. Icking offered an important prototype for current score-interchange sites.

Emerging Desktop Notation Systems of the 1980s and 1990s

The Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities distributed an annual survey to notation-software developers. Examples of specific challenges in notation software were provided. This was a period of rapid change in printing and computer computer technology, as well as operating systems. Nothing stayed the same for long. At its peak the solicitation drew 88 respondents who were eager to show off their latest capabilities. Methods for reproducing their submission, with integrated text and graphics, lagged somewhat behind. Edmund Correia Jr. (a pianist) coordinated the submissions and supervised reproduction of the examples.

In 1994 the IEEE Computer Society published a resume of specific problem types and selected contributions. We made our final solicitation in 1996. By then the dynamism of the field was starting to fade, and a few commercially funded programs began to dominate. We show here a selection of materials as originally submitted. (Some are labeled with details of the printing system used.)

• Amadeus at its best produced elegant notation of limitless complexity based in Poeking, DE. (Output was scalable to 1000 dots per inch.) It was a stand-alone system that traced its origins to the Atari Mega ST4. Kurt Maas was the designer.

Mensurstriche and musica ficta in an early example from Calliope.

• Calliope, graphics-based program developed in the Cambridge Computing Laboratory by William Clocksin, ran on the NextStep operating system. It offered support for early music, lute tablature, and chant repertories.

• Common Music Notation (CMN), a LISP-based program by Bill Schottstaedt, was developed at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCMRA) at Stanford University. Composers using LISP and Heinrich Taube's Common Music were the principal users.

• Dai Nippon Music Processor was developed by the Dai Nippon Printing Company LTD om Ichigawa, JP. Alphanumeric input code was output to MIDI instruments, PostScript printers, a Digiset typesetter, and the Standard Music Expression (SMX) file format, which was principally exchanged with a research group at Waseda University. Featured in from 1988 to 1992.

• DARMS-based systems. DARMS, a print-oriented representation system, stimulated many project ideas (see in ADAM). The longest surviving implementations we know of were Lute Code and the Note Processor, the first one related to the second. The Note Processor, a PC-based program by Stephen Dydo, was in active use from the late 1980s to the mid-90s. Frans Wiering's Lute Code c1990 facilitated the printing of lute tablature from Italy and France with The Note Processor, listed below. See also MusE.

• Graphire Music Press of Wilder, VT, was a high-end system by Alan Talbot, who also developed the Synclavier Music Engraving System. Graphire MP supported line-art graphics, provided a page-layout program, and employed a notation expert system. It offered special provisions for shape-note and handbell notation and well as the ability to combine different kinds of notation in one score. Its primary uses were commercial.

• LIME, or Lippold's Music Editor, was developed Lippold Haken (University of Illinois) and Dorothea Blostein (Queen's University, Kingston, ON) c1991. A multifaceted complex of programs, LIME supported PostScript imaging devices and on-demand printing. At its peak more than 110,000 copies in distribution. The graphical editor was used in NovaNet (PLATO) teaching applications, and it was foundational in the development of programs for unsighted musicians by Dancing Dots (Valley Forge, PA). In recent years Haken has developed the Continuum Keyboard.

• MUP, a music-printing program by John Ark and William Krauss, was an ASCII-based music-formatting system intended for automatic layout.

• MusE, a proprietary DARMS implementation developed by Tom Hall for A-R Editions, Middleton WI, is a heavy-duty system with numerous extensions for special notations. It has been the backbone of A-Rs substantial contributions to otherwise unavailable repertories. A licensible version, Music Engraver (HB Music Engraver), was available for many years.

• Music Manuscriptor was a commercial software system developed by Erato Software Corp., Salt Lake City UT. It was used for composition, orchestration, and generating film scores from sketches.

• MusicTeX (also MusiTeX, MuTeX) was the backbone of the collaboration known as the Werner Icking Music Archive (see ADAM), which is now absorbed into the IMSLP (International Score Music Library Project). MusicTeX consisted of sets of macros, fonts, and programs for music-typesetting compatible with Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting program.

• Nightingale, Don Byrd's notation system for Macs, supported multiple methods of input, display, and playback. Its aim was to give users control over every aspect of musical scores.

• The Note Processor, Stephen Dydo's DARMS-based notation software, was designed for PCs. It made generous provisions for music composed in the later twentieth century.

• Noteability, a sibling of NoteWriter, emphasized graphical flexibility (a rarity for the time). It operated on PCs and Next (NextStep) machines (v. 3.3 or higher).

• NoteWriter was a PostScript-compatible Mac-based program and successor to MusScribe with a strong focus on twentieth-century notation and analytical examples for scholarly journals. Keith Hamel (Vancouver) was its developer.

• Personal Composer was a PC-based program integrating notation, printing, and music sequencing. It enabled print controls that were rare for the time.

• Philip's Music Scribe, developed by Philip Hazel (Cambridge UK) for the British Acorn Archimedes computer, was distributed throughout the English-speaking world excluding North America. A PostScript-compatible program, its special features included coordinated creation of scores and parts and two-stave reductions from four-voice choral music.

• Rhapsody, a predecessor of Encore, was announced by Passport Designs (Foster City CA) but has been invisible since the mid-90s.

• SCORE, Leland Smith's industrial-strength program for the typesetting of musical scores, was developed (1972) at Stanford University's first artifiical intelligence lab on a mainframe computer (PDP 11) with output to a plotter. In existed in a DOS-based conversion from the early 80s until c2020. Over time it transitioned to PCs. Although it always ran most smoothly in FORTRAN, a Windows version was available in the 2000s. SCORE served as a backbone of the collected editions of many composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Schoenberg, Verdi, Wagner. et al.) in the editions of Bärenreiter and Schott. SCORE was known for the esthetic appeal of its scores, its numerous libraries of special symbols (e.g. for harp and drum notation), and its ability to integrate lyrics in non-Roman characters into its scores. Several companion programs included FinalScore for conversion from Finale and MIDISCOREWRITE were in use in the 90s.