OpenMusic Presentation

Programming in OM is mainly done in patches, graphic representations of Lisp functions. Patches are composed of boxes that represent objects or functions, and connections between these boxes.The functions used in OM can be genuine Lisp functions, or specific OM functions that were generally defined in a musical purpose.

"Lisp" is an abbreviation for "LISt Processing". Indeed, Lisp is entirely based on the expression of data and functions by the means of list structures. A list is a set of zero, one, or more elements, delimited by two parenthesis. This means, for instance, an empty list : ( ), a list with one element : (FLOWER), a list with several elements : (1 pretty FLOWER), a list of lists : e.g. (7 (2 8.4) (5 1 0) 0.3). Therefore, musical data will also be expressed in OM algorithms and processes express via list structures.

Common Lisp is a functional programming language, where programming is based upon the use of functions to transform and produce data . Any element of a functional program can be considered a function. Functions receive parameters called arguments , and return data.

Musical processes are formalized and designed as graphic programs in OM, then interpreted as functional expressions.

Programs can have several layers : one can use a program as a single function inside a higher-level program. This is known as functional abstraction, a major and very frequent process used in programming.

The various types of objects used in OM, such as musical objects – chords, notes and so on – are represented by classes , an important concept deriving from object-oriented programming. Classes refer to categories of objects used as patterns that produce items, according to a set of attributes. An object defined from a class is an instance of this class.

Some functions, called generic functions , consist of a set of methods . Methods define specialized behaviours depending on the type (or class) of the arguments a generic function receives.