Music (software)

Music is the common name of a series of music creation programs created by Jester Interactive and published by Codemasters. The programs are tools that allow the user to create music. This can be done either by inserting pre-made riffs and other sound samples, or creating original riffs by composing using musical notation (piano roll). It is also possible to create a music video to play along with the created music. Some versions of the software (e.g. Music 2000) allowed the user to sample audio directly from CDs, while others (e.g. MTV Music Generator 2) came with a USB audio capture peripheral and a microphone.

Music video games/software in the series

Sony PlayStation

Sony PlayStation 2

Microsoft Xbox

Music software

Music software is the internal programming of computers that supports musical production. Music software has been around for nearly 40 years. It has been seen to have profound impacts on education involving music and creative expression. Musical software has become an outlet for people who do not bond with traditional musical instruments, giving people new and creative ways to compose and perform music in ways that has never been seen before.

History

Music software development dates back to the 1960s and 70s. While this software was at best primitive, it nonetheless helped lay the foundation for the future development of the software and synthetic musical production. The early music software was run on large computers at several universities such as Stanford and Penn State. Much of what development came to music software came as a result of the continuous improvement to computers over time. Chain of development is seen clearly in 1978 when nearly 50 music programs came out as a result of MIDI technology, a form of computer communication still used today. MIDI technology provided the key link in hardware for musical software, giving a person a tactile control of an instrument and playing directly into the software in the computer and allowing for maximum control of the production. Fourth generation music software came out in the early 1990s. The largest improvement with this software was the addition of more detailed displays allowing the music software to show more on the screen making the program much easier to use and understand. An important recent development is to automatically transcribe performed music directly to sheet music as developed by ScoreCloud.