News

January 2004:

December 2003:

November 2003:

Seaons greetings to all the jMusic community.

This month saw a siginficant (4x) increase in the speed of MIDI file writing, thanks to Andrew Sorensen improving the sorting of data within that process. Updates are only in the CVS at present. Activity on the jmsuci email list continues to be steady although the presence of some junk mail may lead to the list being moderated in the near future.

October 2003:

September 2003:

August 2003:

July 2003:

The downloadable version of the jMusic tutorials has been updated and is (for now) in sync with the online tutorials.

The Beats By Design project mentioned in February's news has posted a release. It is an 'intelligent' drum machine that uses jMusic.

jMusic developers Tim Opie, Rene Wooller and Andrew Brown had software built with jMusic on display this month at 'Sound Builders'; an exhibition of Australian musical instrument makers.

June 2003:

There is another minor release of jMusic, version 1.4.2, this month. Download the update from SourceForge.

Additions in this release include, a new compressor audio object, better handling of frequency pitches when writing MIDI files, audio envelopes now cope with extremely short notes, addition real-time instruments are included, and a few bug fixes.

jMusic workshops were recently conducted by Andrew Brown at the University of California Santa Cruz (USA) and at Edith Cowan University (Western Australia).

May 2003:

A minor release of jMusic, version 1.4.1, has been posted this month. This release fixes bugs in jMusic 1.4 relating to the correct saving of instruments to MIDI files and the correct rendering audioObjects that extend beyond the note duration (such as delay and ADSR). Download the update from SourceForge.

We've updated the Java logo on this site to reflect Sun's new branding efforts.

April 2003:

Downloads of the new version 1.4 of jMusic surged this month after its release. Some Windows users experienced difficulties uncompressing the jmusic_1.4.tgz file, it is recommended that renaming the file jmusic_1.4.tar.gz may help WinZip parse it correctly.

As well as being part of the music curriculums at QUT, The University of Queensland and Sydney Conservatorium in Ausralia, and the University of Natal in South Africa, jMusic is now taught at Peabody Conservatory in the USA. If you are using jMusic in education let us know and we'll add your activity to the education page.

March 2003:

Version 1.4 of jMusic has been released, coincidently on the third birthday of jMusic's inclusion of audio support.

Additions include: A new audio waveform viewer, additional audio objects, support for MIDIShare i/o in the new msjm package, and the ability to link phrases by relative position with the Anchor class.

Significant improvements include: Widespread support for note pitch as frequency, and for XML score files, ability to display CPN display of multiple parts, improved QuickTime MIDI playback range and accuracy, more accessible JavaSound MIDI and Audio playback, overhauls of almost every GUI utility - especially the HelperGUI, and additional Mod methods.

As well, there are a raft of bug fixes, the documentation is updated, and the revised tutorials (see last month's news) are compatible with jMusic 1.4.

Download the latest version now from SourceForge.

Backwards compatability issue: The QuickTime package has been renamed qtjm so any references to it in your code should be changed from qt to qtjm. For example, import qt.QTUtil; will become import qtjm.QTUtil; Note that Java version 1.4.1 for Mac OS X has broken QuickTime support.

A new source package has been created in the CVS with this release. The currently active CVS source tree is named src14.

February 2003:

All of the jMusic tutorials have been completely revised this month, thanks to Rene Wooller, Derryn McMaster and Adam Kirby. There are almost 200 tutorials at present. New ones include those on XML, Genetic Algorithms, and the wave viewer.

Open source projects using jMusic have been listed on SourceForge, namely, SoundGrid and BeatsByDesign.

January 2003:

The work toward a next release, mentioned last November, is hotting up. For anyone who wants to contibute new ideas and code, now is a good time. Contact us. Tutorial updates to accompany the next release are also well underway.

December 2002:

Season's greetings to all in the jMusic community - and beyond.

While the stable release, Version 1.3 carries on, there have been further updates and modifications behind the scenes which are availible via CVS for all those who can't wait for the next release. Changes in cvs this month include revised QuickTime classes allowing full note ranges, longer note dutations, nate panning, and much greater timing accuracy when using the QTCycle class. There are also a number of additional methods in the Mod class, many provided by Rene Wooller, including increaseDynamic(), varyLength(), randomize() and an additional copy() method.

There is a new link on the jMusic Education page to Derryn McMaster's real-time gesture control program, AMIS.

November 2002:

A month for milestones; jMusic has its fourth birthday and we passed the 10,000 download mark on Sourceforge!

There have been a number of upgrades in the CVS tree and we are working toward a new release that includes them in the new year.

October 2002:

Activity on the MIDI i/o front has increased this month, with better MIDI capabilities in the latest Java reslease and work at QUT on MIDIShare support for jMusic, the interactive capabilities of jMusic look set to increase markedly in the next few months. Anyone wanting to add development support to those efforts is welcome - a translator to and from PortMIDI would be nice :)

September 2002:

There have been subtle layout updates in the past month to the tutorial index page, and upgrades to several of the audio tutorials, including those on Additive Synthesis and Amplitude Modulation. Some fixes to the jMusic code base associated with these updates are availible in the CVS tree.

August 2002:

There are a couple of new Mod class methods that deal with panning; spread() which randomises pan values and bounce() which alternates panning from left to right. Some audio classes have been updated and expended. All these are currently only in the CVS tree, not part of the jmusic.jar download.

Work is underway to more tightly ingerate the compositional and audio elements of jMusic, so any suggestions about how this might be done are welcome.

July 2002:

There has been plenty of activity in the download department this month, mainly because people are updating to jMusic version 1.3.

The tutorial search index has been updated to include all the new tutorials and to exclude other (irrelevant) pages in the jMusic web site. Tutorial searches now only provide tutorial pages as relevant hits.

June 2002:

Version 1.3 of jMusic has been released.

Changes include, new and updated audio objects, pitch specification as a fractional frequency in hertz, extended music notation features (thanks to Al Christians), additional audio features, removal of a number of unused older classes, and numerous bug fixes.

jMusic has cleaned up its bedroom. In version 1.3 the separation between jm and jmx package branches has been dissolved - all classes are now in the jm package. This means that compiling jMusic source will require Java 1.3 or higher. Users of Java 1.1 or 1.2 can run applications as before against the jmusic.jar file. Uses with jmx dependencies can simply change their import statements from jmx.classes.etc... to jm.classes.etc..., recompile, and all should be fine.

For those that like source with their jMusic, a new branch of the CVS tree - 'src13' -has been established with the code for this release. Developers should check it out and work from this version.

Additionally, tutorials have been added for new or revised features. Including, pitch in hertz, extended features for the CPN notation display, granular synthesis, and realtime audio. Many of the existing tutorials have been revised to work better with the latest code.

May 2002:

There are seven new musical examples on the music page of this site, written by QUT undergraduates-most after only one semester of work with jMusic.

The email list has been busy with discussions about jMusic Applets/WebStart - check out the archives for the details.

April 2002:

This month musical instruments (in the broadest possible definition of the term) were featured as part of the REV Festival in Brisbane, Australia. The festival featured Real, Electronic and Virtual instrument makers and performances on those instruments. jMusic-based projects included Rene Wooller's 'ZerOne' (formerly LEMu) live dance music software, Tim Opie's real time granular synthesis 'Java Fish' (ask him), and Andrew Brown's real time audio collage installation 'InterMelb Sonic City'.

There are new tutorials on adding jMusic music to a Java computer game.

March 2002:

A tutorial has been added that helps newbies get jMusic and Java running on Windows 95/98.

There's been much activity developing audio objects for various real-time projects, the outcomes of which are making their way into CVS.

Much discussion about MIDI input and output in realtime has taken place on and off the email list, with JavaSound MIDI, MIDI Share, QuickTime and JavaMIDI all being used. If you have experience in this area add you comments to the list.

February 2002:

The jMusic web site has a new home. http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au So update your bookmarks and links now.

There is plenty of research projects that use jMusic out there. Some are now listed on the revised Education page. Let us know if your doing research using jMusic and wll add a reference and link.

January 2002:

There is a new application, JSound, listed on the Applications page. It's an XML to MIDI converter. Check it out and visit the page-but be warned that the site is all in Italian. (jMusic is now even more international!)

There is a new gui that displays Histograms of score data. At present it's only in the CVS tree (not the stable release), but there is a tutorial.

Speaking of CVS, be aware that current code is in the jMusic/src directory and current instruments in the jMusic/inst directory. Please ignore any other directories, they are empty.

There is a contemporary instrument making festival in Brisbane this April, REV, featuring several jMusic based live performance and installation pieces. Come along if you can.

December 2001:

There's been plently of activity with folk downloading version 1.2 of jMusic and it's been good to get some newly vocal folk on the list with suggestions and bugs. We've been tending to these and enjoying the Christmas respite for a time. A simple granular synthesis audio object and instrument have been added to the CVS tree and are being further developed as you read.

November 2001:

It's the third birthday of jMusic's public release - and you get the present.

Version 1.2 of jMusic has been released. The jmusic.tgz file includes the jmusic.jar file, source, and documentation. This release features an updated audio architecture and various improvements to the music and qt packages.

This month was the conclusion of the first semester of jMusic audio teaching at QUT, and the tutorials on sound synthesis developed for this course are availible at this site. Students from this course gave public concerts of their music and live performance software developed using jMusic. Look out for samples on the music page.

October 2001:

The QuickTime utility class (QTUtil) has a new method to send any MIDI channel message on request (sendMIDIMessage). A convenience method for controller messages (such as volume, panning, and sustain pedal) has been added (sendControlChange). These have been sucessfully used for a virtual MIDI mixer to external devices. These additions are in the CVS tree.

A new tutorial about rending your jMusic scores using your own audio samples is here.

Last month we reported 3000 downloads since January, well one month later we've hit 4000!

September 2001:

jMusic downloads from SourceForge pass the 3000 mark (since January 2001)!

Audio instruments have been added to the CVS tree - most are availible from the Instruments page as well.

An 'unstable' version of jMusic has been added to SourceForge for downloading. This will be updated more often than the stable release and enables those without CVS access to keep up with the latest developments (especially at present with jMusic audio updates).

Program changes in the JavaSound MIDI playback code are now working in the unstable release.

August 2001:

There is a new Mod transposition method for doing diatonic (rather than chromatic) pitch shifts.

There is a HelperGUI utility to provide some 'user friendliness' for novice users. See the tutorial.

Audio synthesis tutorials continue to roll out.

This month these updates require the CVS version of the code to function fully but will be included in future releases.

July 2001:

New audio tutorials have begun to appear.

New instruments have been added to this site to coincide with the audio tutorials.

Install instructions for Mac OS X and updated instructions for other platforms have been added to the download page.

The LEMu application, wriiten by Rene Wooler and Nicolas Coleman in jMusic, was featured at concerts in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane (Australia) last month. Check out the video. The guys also gave a paper on LEMu at the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2001.

jMusic was featured as a prominent part of the Creative Industries Faculty and CI Research and Applications Centre launches at QUT.

June 2001:

We have released version 1.1 of jMusic get it from sourceforge.

Included in version 1.1 are the following features: Faster audio processing, Real time audio playback, JavaSound MIDI playback (thanks to Mark Elston), XML score file support (thanks to Adam Kirby), updated CPN display, and numerous new convenience methods and bug fixes.

Updated documentation has details of all the features of jMusic - new and old.

The tutorials for all those new features are still a little behind schedule, but we promise that there will be lots of new tutorials over the next few months now that the release is stable - in particular we will be focussing on audio tutorials.

jMusic applications were featured by Sun Microsystems who had some complementary comments about jMusic.

May 2001:

This month there has been quite a bit of activity on the jMusic-dev list, join the list to contribute, checkout the CVS code tree to get the latest, or simply look forward to updates to the public release reflecting those developments soon.

New music from the revised LEMu application has been added to the music page.

Field trials of the Online Music Tools have begun in Australian schools. See the education page for more details.

April 2001:

The jMusic tutorials have been completely revised to comply with the version 1.x release, and a new zip archive of the tutorials has been created to allow you to access them offline. There are new tutorials on Markov processes by Andrew Sorensen and building a real time drum machine by Andrew Brown

The current state of the Online Music Tools project can monitored here.

The QTUtil class has been optimised for QuickTime 5.0, and QTCycle (real time) class added as used in the drum machine tutorial (see above) and is derrived from the LEMu application.

The Mod class has some new methods including normalise() and shake() that effect a note's dynamic value.

March 2001:

This month a revised jm.jar file (which includes the notation GIF images) was added to the 1.0 release area at SourceForge. Update your 1.0 download by replacing the old jm.jar file.

The tutorials are now mostly up to date with the 1.0 release. New "lesson tours" (sequential tutorials) have been added for a basic intro, writing an arpeggiator, and utilising java inheritance.

This site has been extended to include a jMusic in education page highlighting the use of jMusic in schools and Universities, and a jMusic audio instruments page which is the site to visit for the latest audio instruments.

Pictures of new applications have been added to the applications page.

An online music tools project that uses jMusic has begun this month at QUT. So we'll be sharpening our jMusic-over-the-'net skills.

Real time audio using the Java Sound API has been added to the under-development build. Check it out with CVS.

February 2001:

With the release of version 1.0 there have been a number of architectural changes to the jMusic classes and package, as well as some small, but significant, method changes.

The arguments to a new Part have been reordered to be: String title, int instrument, int channel. This allows for a shorter constructor with only the first two arguments, title and instrument, that is useful for audio classes - where MIDI channel is irrelevant.

The default tempo is now 60bpm which aligns beats with seconds nicely. Scores and Parts now have a tempo attribute, with associated getTempo() and setTempo() methods.

Methods which translate the jMusic data structure to other forms (such as MIDI, graphical display, audio file, etc.) have been consolidated into classes within the jm.util directory. This was done to provide a more logical separation of compositional processes and ways of communicating the compositional outcomes. See the new utility tutorial.

The repeat() method in the music/data classes has been updated, and the loop() method removed. A new repeat tutorial has all the details.

The jm.music.tools directory has a significant new class called Mod (modification). It is a static class that contains almostg all the old music.data manipulation methods, such as repeat(), transpose(), and so on. Many methods have been relocated to Mod from Phrase, CPhrase, Part and Score. Check the tutorial for an overview and the updated docs for details.

QuickTime playback classes are now in a separate package, providing a cleaner separation from the core jm classes. You can easily choose to include them or not. *nix folk rejoice.

A jmswing package has been added with GUI classes that use the Java Swing APIs.

MIDI read and write methods have been further improved (fixed) thanks to Andrew Sorensen's efforts this month. They now support tempo, volume and pan data.

The old (Nov 1999) and little-used DrawScore classes have been updated and renamed Sketch. The Sketch class supports phrase input by drawing with the mouse. Check out the sketch tutorial for more detailed info.

Documentation has been updated and includes the recent changes and full documentation of Adam Kirby's phrase analysis classes.

Adam's Phrase Analysis app now has the facility to display the score as notation and to show the statistics as bar graphs. This makes information quicker to assess without having to export the data into a spreadsheet.

January 2001:

A new guided tour called Music By Numbers has been created by Andrew Troedson. Get on the bus.

jMusic is now an open source project at SourceForge.net which includes facilities for you to post bug reports, ask questions, and join the jMusic email list.

December 2000:

Happy Christmas to all in the jMusic community :)

Due to the increasing number of tutorials, a search engine has been added to the tutorials page to help you find references to the topics, classes, or methods you're seeking.

We've been busy updating and adding to jMusic, and if you can help out let us know. Look out for a new release in January 2001. This is causing a few inconsistencies between the tutorial pages and the current version :( but all should be smooth again next month.

November 2000:

Happy Birthday jMusic. This site is two years old this month, and with it jMusic's public existence. Take a moment to look down the news page and review where we've come.

The reference list of books continues to expand. Get inspiration for jMusic projects by reading some of them.

The melodic extension app (in the apps directory) has been used in research trials concerned with assiting student melody writing skills in schools in Australia this month.

jMusic has been tested running under Personal Java on a Windows CE handheld computer - Vadem Clio 1050. There is no compiler at present, but the classes and apps do run. Using the notation input with a pen interface is particularly cool.

October 2000:

Download jMusic version 2000.10

There is now a page dedicated to Java programs written using jMusic. These include music analysis, live electronic music, and automated composition with genetic algorithms. Let us know about your apps so we can feature them.

An application call LEMu was used to do the first jMusic live performance at the Brisbane Powerhouse last month. Realtime MIDI output was possible using the QuickTime utilities.

A tool for displaying phrases as common practice notation has been added to the gui classes. Check out the tutorial.

A new way of calling jMusic displays has been implemented. In the jm/util directory is a View class. Use its static methods to view the jMusic score as a ShowScore or Notation display. Future display options will also be called through the View class. e.g., View.notate(score); or View.show(score);

The download has been more formally divided into classes and source (to keep download size under control). Only the classes are needed to use jMusic but the sources will be required to make additions and fixes.

September 2000:

The MIDI reading methods have been improved to handle type 1 MIDI files and files implementing running status. Also, rests are added to the jMusic phrases as required when MIDI files are read. What this means in the real world is that jMusic should now be able to read note data from MIDI files exported from the vast majority of applications.

The QuickTime playback window now includes a tempo adjustment.

Get version 2000:09 which includes the above enhancements.

August 2000:

jMusic usage expands. It is now being taught to composition students in the Bachelor of Music program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia, under the watchful eye of Greg Schiemer. We welcome those folk to the jMusic community.

Version 2000.08 is released. (Yes, we now have version numbers!) Download your copy today. Significantly, it includes a revised audio architecture and the following new features.

The documentation has been updated to match the new release, and comes with the download.

New compositional processes have been added as methods to the Phrase class. They include, cycle, palindrome, elongate, retrograde, inversion, shuffle, and rotate. e.g., score.shuffle(). We hope these will stimulate interesting musical ideas, but don't let it stop you writing your own processes and methods. A tutorial page with an overview of the music data methods has been added.

jMusic scores can now be played directly via QuickTime musical instruments on MacOS and Windows if QT is installed. This code utilises Apple's QT Java libraries.

July 2000:

jMusic goes public at interFACES, the Australiasian Computer Music Conference, with a workshop, four papers on research projects that utilise jMusic, and the world premiere of a piece totally done with jMusic audio, called 'Colliloquay' by Alistair Riddell and Andrew Brown.

There continue to be substantial updates to the audio classes, for examples see the tutorials Spray,Chorale Audio, Additive Synthesis, and FM Synthesis.

A music page has been added to this site with examples of jMusic works. More will be added as time goes on so come back again to hear more, or even better, submit your own jMusic works.

Updated versions of a downloadable tutorials have been made. The the tutorials have more than doubled in size since the first being downloadable in April 2000 - this gives some idea of the pace of tutorial development for jMusic. As always, the online tutorials are the latest and greatest.

June 2000:

The jMusic tutorials have been revised this month to make sure they all work with the latest version of the code, including the extended JMC constants. There are some additional tutorials relating to different musical styles, including Gamelan, Metre, and Jazz.

Adam Kirby has been busy refining the Phrase Analysis classes.

May 2000:

Check out the new tutorial on jMusic constants. The JMC class has received an overhaul including new constants for rhythmic values, increased accuracy of triplet constants, and upper-case pitch constants.

Work has started on a research project to write melodic extensions using Genetic Algorithms with jMusic. This will result in new analysis and notation tools. Look out for them in the coming months.

April 2000:

After the effort over the past few months to get the audio classes out we've needed to get the jMusic house in order again. The web site has been updated in numerous ways including a refreshed logo, and a reorganisation of the tutorial index.

The tutorial web pages are now available for download so you don't have to be logged on to read through them. A number of new tutorials have been added including examples of generative processes such as Cellular Automata and Bass Mutation, and examples of music analysis from MIDI file, and the reuse of data from a MIDI file.

March 2000:

Audio has arrived!! Download the latest jMusic source and then check out the Audio tutorials.

The tutorial index has been expanded and rearranged. Some additional tutorials have been added this month. Including the jm-808,Audio101 and Audio Kit. If this all sounds a bit 'commercial' to you, fear not, more 'arty' examples are on their way soon. So check back next month or, better still, contribute some of your own.

February 2000:

jMusic teaching begins at QUT. Second year undergraduates who specialise in computer music as part of the Bachelor of Music course are learning to compose with jMusic. This should result in some thorough revising of the tutorials and examples over the coming months.

Andrew Troedson starts a Master's degree program at QUT on generative music in computer games that involves the development of compositional algorithms in jMusic. Andrew T is a contributor of tutorial examples to this web site.

Audio in March. . . stay tuned!!

January 2000:

Happy New Year!

There were a number of enhancements to the music classes over the Christmas break. Including some new structural methods such as append(). Some minor fixes and updates to the tutorials included a CPhrase tutorial.

The big news is that Audio is coming . . . look out for it soon.

December 1999:

New methods added to the Music data classes: fadeIn(), fadeOut(), getEndTime(), and empty(). Most of these were written by Andrew Troedson for his BandMachine program.

New JavaDoc documentation has been generated to include the new methods.(And fix many other bits - well overdue!)

A new ShowScore class has been added. It is a music stave-like piano-roll display based on DrawScore which relies on Common Practice Notation reading skills, and is resizable.

A list of recommended books and computer music links has been added to the site.

November 1999:

The DrawScore class has been added. It displays a graphic piano-roll view of a jMusic score. Check out the demo and tutorial.

October 1999:

Simple GUI demos are added to the tutorial. Make your jMusic classes go beyond the command line.

September 1999:

The Mozart Dice Game is implemented in jMusic. For some instant music check it out. It uses the chord class, CPhrase.

July 1999:

Alistair Riddell starts work in Melbourne, Australia, on a jMusic composition commissioned by QUT. Hear it at the ACMA conference in July 2000.

June 1999:

After a hectic week of debate and coding at QUT a more refined and stable version of jMusic is now public. The chord phrase (CPhrase) class was added and numerous improvements made.

The first public forum on jMusic was held at QUT, Brisbane, Australia.

March 1999:

The jMusic tutorials have been established at this site. Good tutorials are a high priority for us, so feedback to improve them is welcome.

November 1998:

jMusic goes public - but without a fanfare. The jMusic web site is established, enabling people to read about and download jMusic for the first time.