SMucK: Symbolic Music in ChucK

SMucK (Symbolic Music in ChucK) is a library and workflow for creating music with symbolic data in the ChucK programming language. It extends ChucK by providing a framework for symbolic music representation, playback, and manipulation. SMucK introduces classes for scores, parts, measures, and notes; the latter encode musical information such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. These data structures allow users to organize musical information sequentially and hierarchically in ways that reflect familiar conventions of Western music notation. SMucK supports data interchange with formats like MusicXML and MIDI, enabling users to import notated scores and performance data into SMucK data structures. SMucK also introduces SMucKish, a compact high-level input syntax, designed to be efficient, human-readable, and live-codeable. The SMucK playback system extends ChucK's strongly-timed mechanism with dynamic temporal control over real-time audio synthesis and other systems including graphics and interaction. Taken as a whole, SMucK's design philosophy treats symbolic music data not only as static representations but also as mutable, recombinant building blocks for algorithmic and interactive processing. By integrating symbolic music into a strongly-timed, concurrent programming language, SMucK's workflow goes beyond data representation and playback, and opens new possibilities for algorithmic composition, instrument design, and musical performance.