Unix music tools at bellcore

A number of Bellcore projects have required software to manipulate musical data at a range of different conceptual levels from notes to whole classes of pieces. In the absence of suitable preexisting software for these projects, a set of modules was written in house to run under the Unix® operating system. These programs were designed to be tools, each performing a specific subtask with little or no preconception of the particular combinations in which they would be used. Toward that end, a standard internal data representation was chosen, and all programs were either written to process that format directly or, as more conceptual needs arose, to process a format that could be converted to the standard.