Roland Gurt, a musician and regular reader here, recently asked whether I could explain some of the computer science terminology that keeps appearing in these posts – terms like functional programming, immutability, and transducers – in layman's terms, and preferably from a musical point of view.

I was genuinely glad to be asked.

At this stage of Ooloi, nothing has yet been drawn on the screen. What has been happening is work on problems that sit underneath notation, problems that have been considered 'mostly solvable' at best since the 1980s. The deterministic accidental system I recently wrote about is one such problem. It looks abstract because it has to be. It deals with musical meaning before anything becomes visible.

This post is an attempt to explain why these terms keep appearing, and what they actually refer to, without turning this into a programming tutorial. It's written for musicians who are curious, not for programmers who already know the vocabulary.

​One reason Ooloi can attempt this at all is that it's a new system.

Most notation programs in use today have roots in techniques from the 1980s and 1990s. Internally, they tend to look surprisingly similar. They represent music in roughly the same way and rely on the same architectural assumptions: object-oriented design, mutable state, and large codebases written in C or C++.

Once a system has grown for decades on top of those assumptions, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to rethink its foundations without breaking everything at once. We saw Finale collapse in 2024 for precisely this reason.

There have been only two real departures from that lineage. One was Igor Engraver in the 1990s. The other was Dorico from 2016. Dorico has much in common with Igor Engraver in terms of musical data representation, and it made important advances. But even Dorico still rests on the technological assumptions of that era: object-oriented design, mutable state, and C++ at its core.

Ooloi puts all its money on a different assumption, namely that those older techniques fundamentally are architecturally inadequate for the problem of music notation as we now understand it. That inadequacy has consequences for users: accidentals behaving oddly, freezes and delays, limited scalability, no real collaboration, and poor use of modern multi-core machines.

​To address these problems, Ooloi uses an entirely different set of techniques.

​It also needs to be said very clearly that music notation, from a computer science perspective, is an extremely hard problem.

It's not 'a word processor for music'. That analogy has done lasting harm.

Music notation sits in the same general complexity class as compiler construction, symbolic mathematics systems, or advanced typesetting engines. It combines several difficult aspects at once: hierarchical structure, temporal meaning, long-range context, simultaneous layers, and a visual representation that's not a straightforward reflection of the underlying data.

A compiler reads a stream of symbols, builds meaning from context, enforces consistency rules, and produces deterministic output. Music notation does all of that, and then adds engraving conventions, historical practice, performer expectations, and visual clarity on top.

If you approach this domain with tools designed for relatively static documents or interactive graphics, you end up fighting the problem instead of modelling it. The result is systems that work impressively most of the time, but fail in edge cases, which in music aren't rare.

​Before any technical terminology enters the picture, there's a simple musical requirement.

If you engrave the same piece twice, you should get the same result twice.

Not roughly the same. Not 'close enough'. The same.

Most notation software quietly gives up on this requirement. Instead, they rely on rules of thumb: 'this usually works', 'this is how engravers tend to want it', 'clean this up manually if it looks odd'. Musicians have learned to live with that because, for a long time, there was no alternative.

From a musical point of view, this is deeply unsatisfactory. It means the system doesn't really know what it's doing. When things get complicated, it starts guessing. And once guessing enters the picture, everything downstream becomes fragile.

Determinism simply means that given the same musical input, the system makes the same musical decisions every time.

​Imagine packing a suitcase before a trip. You put clothes, toothpaste, shoes inside. Once the suitcase is closed and checked in, you make decisions based on what you packed. You don't buy extra clothes at the airport because you trust they're already there.

Now imagine that, while the suitcase is in transit, someone silently changes its contents. In a trivial case this is merely annoying. In a serious system – air-traffic control, medical records, nuclear command – it's catastrophic: people might die.

To reason about anything, you must be able to trust the past.

In computer science, immutability means this: once a thing has been created, it never changes. If you need a slightly different version, you don't alter the original. You create a new one. The old one remains exactly as it was.

This sounds wasteful until you realise that modern systems can do this efficiently by sharing structure internally. This is where a bit of Harry Potter magic comes in. If someone changes one shirt, they get a new suitcase with just that one shirt changed, while you still have your original suitcase, untouched and with the original shirt still inside.

In music notation this matters because the domain is full of remembered context. Accidentals depend on what happened earlier. Key signatures establish expectations. Voices interact. If earlier musical facts can silently change while later decisions depend on them, determinism collapses.

​Most people already understand from school what a function is.

If x is 100, the result is always 101. Not sometimes. Always.

That property is determinism.

Now imagine that x is not a number but a suitcase. If the function's result depends on what is inside the suitcase, you must be absolutely certain that the contents haven't changed since last time. And for this, the suitcase needs to be one of our magical suitcases. Otherwise, calling the same function twice with what looks like 'the same input' might silently produce different results. The consequences range from a missing accidental to obliterating Tokyo.

Functional programming is simply the discipline of insisting on this property at scale. Functions don't reach out and change things behind your back. They don't depend on hidden mutable state. They take inputs and return results without any such surprises.

In Ooloi this matters because musical decisions must be reproducible. If accidental decisions or tie behaviour depend on invisible state changes, the system cannot be fully trusted, even if it usually looks right.

A central idea in Ooloi is to treat the score as something that flows.

Music is read from left to right. Context accumulates. Decisions depend on what has already passed. Accidentals are remembered and later forgotten. Grace notes steal time from what they follow. Tuplets locally distort time.

This is not a static tree that you occasionally inspect. It's musical meaning - semantics - unfolding over time.

Once you accept that, you need a way to traverse this stream efficiently without constantly rebuilding lists or retracing paths.

​And this brings us to transducers.

​Imagine a high-security prison complex with multiple buildings, floors, and endless cells. Every day, a warden must traverse the entire structure to take stock of what's inside. And he must do it in the same order each day, just as the notes in a piece must be played in the same order each time.

Most of the warden's effort goes into navigation: remembering routes, tracking where he's been, writing lists just to keep his place. He does this over and over again, every day.

A transducer is like giving the warden Ariadne's thread. But again, there's magic involved: the thread weaves from cell to cell of its own accord. The route through the maze is fixed and reliable. Navigation stops being the problem. 

Better still, the warden doesn't even have to walk, thanks to more magic: the thread acts like a firehose and sends back all the information to the origin. The warden can sit in his office while the traversal happens and receive a continuous stream of information about what's found along the way. He can devote his entire attention to the meaning of the data, not how to walk the prison complex.

The crucial point is that traversal and processing are separated. The route is handled once. The real work happens as data flows past, without intermediate lists or repeated navigation.

In Ooloi, transducers allow musical meaning to be processed in exactly this way. The system doesn't build a large structure and then analyse it afterwards. It reacts to musical facts as they appear, deterministically and efficiently.

This is what a transducer is. Then there's even more wizardry involved in that several transducers can be stacked on each other to perform even more abstract operations. The path has been abstracted away, the distractions are gone, and the flow of  meaningful musical data is all that matters.

​These terms aren't ideology, and they're not badges of virtue. They're simply the most precise language I've found for describing how musical meaning behaves when you try to handle it rigorously.

The music comes first. The vocabulary follows.

​When I began coding Igor Engraver around 1995, the choice of platform was straightforward. Macs were where creativity lived. Windows – clumsy, unintuitive, user-hostile – was for accountants and management consultants. I needed to escape Finale's stranglehold, and I needed the best possible foundation for professional music engraving.

That foundation was QuickDraw GX.

Apple had released something genuinely remarkable: a complete 2D graphics and typography system with sophisticated font handling, Bézier curve operations, transformation matrices, and sub-pixel anti-aliased rendering. For music notation – which is essentially complex typography with thousands of precisely positioned curves – GX was perfect. Not adequate, not sufficient: perfect.

Igor Engraver was built on QuickDraw GX from the beginning. Mac-only, by choice and by necessity. Windows didn't matter. We founded NoteHeads, shipped the software, and believed we'd eventually need to address cross-platform support. But that was a distant concern.

​AlphaMask Inc. was founded in 1999 by Mike Reed and Oliver Steele. Reed had been the tech lead on Apple's TrueType and font system. Steele had been on the QuickDraw GX development team and had led the Apple Dylan project at Apple Cambridge – the former Coral Software, where Macintosh Common Lisp originated.

The people who built QuickDraw GX had left Apple and founded a company to continue that work. When Apple made what I considered a profound mistake in abandoning GX for OS X, the GX team apparently agreed – to the point of leaving Apple entirely to focus on their superior graphics engine.

Whether I knew about Steele's Lisp background when we chose AlphaMask, I honestly cannot recall. I like to think the choice was purely on merit: AlphaMask offered GX-level capabilities in a more decoupled, portable form. It did what we needed. The fact that someone who understood both graphics and Lisp had designed the API might explain why it integrated so cleanly with our Lisp codebase, but that may simply be a pleasant historical detail rather than a decision factor.

Either way, when QuickDraw GX disappeared, I had unknowingly followed the people whose work I trusted.

​Years later, when designing Ooloi, I chose Skia as the graphics foundation. Modern, open-source, GPU-accelerated, excellent typography, sophisticated path operations, cross-platform. I chose it on technical merit, comparing it against alternatives and finding it superior.

I had no idea that Skia was founded by Mike Reed and Cary Clark – another QuickDraw GX team member – a few years after AlphaMask. Or that Google had acquired Skia in 2005 and made it the graphics engine for Chrome, Android, and Flutter. Or that billions of devices now use Skia for their rendering. Or that the internal name at Apple for Quickdraw GX was - Skia.

QuickDraw GX has had three incarnations: first as itself, then as AlphaMask, then as Skia. The same design philosophy that made GX excellent – abstract graphics model, resolution independence, professional typography – survived through each transformation. I recognised that quality in 1995, in 2000, and in 2025, without realising I was choosing the same team's work each time.

Perhaps this indicates that certain kinds of graphical excellence are simply necessary for music notation, a constant need that has persisted since the last millennium. Or perhaps I'm simply stubborn enough to arrive at the same solutions regardless of how much time passes.

​Another detail emerged from the research. AlphaMask was acquired by OpenWave around 2001–2002, and the desktop product was discontinued. OpenWave wanted the technology for mobile browsers, not for professional graphics applications. Support ended, updates ceased.

2002 was also when NoteHeads fell silent.

Whether that timing was coincidental or causal, I cannot say with certainty. Finding a replacement for AlphaMask's capabilities in 2002 would have been extraordinarily difficult – arguably impossible. The engineering effort to rebuild on different foundations would have been substantial. Perhaps the ponytailed pop zombies running NoteHeads at that point gave up when the graphics engine disappeared. Perhaps they simply declined to invest in solving the problem. I don't know if we'll ever have a definitive answer, and frankly, the question is less interesting than the pattern it reveals.

​The reassuring aspect of this circle is that it cannot break the same way again.

Skia powers the rendering in Chrome, Android, Flutter, and countless other applications. It has billions of users. It's open-source, BSD-licensed, maintained by Google and a broad community. Even if Google stopped development – which won't happen, as Android depends on it – the codebase is available, the expertise exists, and the user base is large enough that maintenance would continue.

Similarly, Ooloi runs on the JVM, which has multiple vendors: Oracle, Azul, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Eclipse. Battle-tested is a trite phrase, but it's accurate here. The JVM has been refined for nearly three decades across billions of deployments. It provides capabilities – proper concurrency models, cross-platform consistency, mature tooling – that enable much of Ooloi's architecture.

Everything Ooloi depends upon is either open-source with massive adoption or has redundant commercial vendors ensuring longevity. This isn't accidental. This is architectural design informed by what happens when foundations disappear.

Looking back across thirty years, there appears to be a unifying pattern that I wasn't consciously aware of whilst making these decisions. A consistent need for graphical and typographical excellence. A recognition of quality when it appears, regardless of who built it or where it came from. A preference for sophisticated abstractions over quick implementations.

Perhaps I've learnt something during that time about building software that endures. Or perhaps I'm simply persistent enough to keep arriving at similar solutions when faced with similar problems. The distinction might not matter.

What matters is that the circle closes. The technology that made Igor Engraver possible in 1995 has evolved, through the hands of its original creators, into the technology that makes Ooloi possible in 2025. And this time, the foundations cannot be deprecated on a whim or acquired into oblivion.

​I'm re-reading Gardner Read's Music Notation from 1974. I bought my copy in 1977, which makes me 16 at the time – old enough to take it seriously, young enough to believe comprehensive understanding was achievable through diligent study. Later, this book would influence Igor Engraver's formatting decisions, though not always in ways I'd care to defend today.

What strikes me now is what Read doesn't cover. There's nothing about ledger line thicknesses, actual distances in spaces between noteheads and accidentals, sit-straddle-hang rules, slur curvatures, or tie formatting. None of the engraver-level detail that Elaine Gould's Behind Bars (2011) and Ted Ross's The Art of Music Engraving & Processing (1970, but I didn't discover it until much later) document so comprehensively. Read gives you musical orthography – what symbols mean and when to use them – but not typographical execution.

​When Magnus Johansson published examples of Igor's output on NOTATIO recently, I experienced that particular species of discomfort that comes from seeing your 25-year-old work through 2025 eyes. The ledger line thicknesses were wrong. The beam slants were inconsistent. We clearly knew nothing about sit-straddle-hang.

So what made Igor well-received? Not typographical perfection, that's certain.

First, integrated parts. Only Composer's Mosaic had them at the time, and Igor had them long before Finale or Sibelius. This alone solved a workflow problem that cost professional copyists days of manual labour.

Second, the user experience didn't fight the music. After spending years with Finale on The Maids – full score, parts, piano reduction – I ended up hating Finale. I've called it 'as user-friendly as a cactus' more than once. Creating something that didn't actively work against the creative process was evidently a sufficient innovation.

Third, note entry was fast and powerful. The modal Flow Mode interface that would later vanish completely from notation software for 23 years gave professional users substantial note entry and editing speed improvements. When you're saving many hours per score, you'll forgive a few ledger lines being slightly too thin – and there was a setting for that anyway.

Fourth, we had stellar MIDI playback and a semantic model that made things consistent rather than a collection of rules-of-thumb. That alone provided predictability. And everything could be adjusted – the absence of automatic sit-straddle-hang rules just meant more manual interventions.

The landscape in 1996 made these trade-offs reasonable. The streamlined experience outweighed what we today immediately see was missing.

​2025 is not 1996.

The leading programs have improved considerably since 1996. They're genuinely competent at beam placement and formatting – not flawless, but competent enough that egregious errors are rare.

A new program entering this landscape must get the foundations correct from day one. Beam placement, slurs, ties, accidental positioning – these must be flawless, not 'good enough to ship'. The field has progressed, and users' baseline expectations have risen accordingly.

This is as it should be. But there's something deeper that hasn't been solved.

Here's what I've stated repeatedly: Ooloi is not about 'disruption' or market share. The entire motivation is to escape what commercialism leads to and create something modern, scalable, and architecturally correct from the ground up. Why? Because music notation is an extremely messy and difficult field of computation, and it requires correctness to address its long-standing problems of scalability and accuracy.

This starts with internal representation.

The old programs – and many modern ones still in broad use – were all based on a paradigm inherited from MIDI. MIDI was the standard for pitch representation at the time, and all notation software needed MIDI output for playback anyway. This meant pitches were MIDI numbers (0-127) with attachments indicating whether they were sharp or flat. Figuring out musical context – for instance, to determine what accidentals to draw – had to be derived from something with no connection to musical structure whatsoever. It had to be inferred from context each time.
​
That's at the root of the problems programs still have with accidentals. The internal representation is designed around the presentation – the visual aspect – not around the meaning, the semantics, of the music.

And of course, MIDI has no concept of microtonality, which is why notation programs struggle with microtonal entry, presentation, and playback.

Furthermore, for duration, these early programs based their rhythmic representation on a raster of 480 subdivisions – ticks – of a quarter note (TPQN: Ticks Per Quarter Note). A quarter note is 480 ticks long in some arbitrary tempo, an eighth is 240, and so forth. This is the equivalent of pixels in a JPEG, which means there's a limit to what the raster can represent.

The number 480 isn't evenly divisible by very many factors. This leads to all the problems we're still seeing in music notation programs. Various kinds of duct tape – rules of thumb, arbitrary rounding, tolerance spans – have to be used. When tuplets are nested, the approximation errors compound. We're still seeing the effects of this unfortunate MIDI heritage in 2025.

A MIDI-derived representation centred on presentation – the visual aspect – will always have difficulty interpreting what the music means. That interpretive layer is essential for presenting it correctly and consistently.

For that, you need a semantic model, which turns this on its head. The representation is 'musically correct' and detached from its presentation. Once this is in place, you can make informed decisions instead of relying on rounding and rules-of-thumb. It also makes things like playback trivial, which in MIDI-based systems is paradoxically complex.
​

​Igor Engraver was, I believe, one of the first programs – possibly the very first – to use a fully semantic internal model. It was also the first to model the real world by using Musicians playing Instruments, which allowed new and powerful abstractions.

It's interesting that Dorico also has this arrangement, though they call their Musicians 'Players' – but it's the same thing. I have no idea whether Daniel Spreadbury was inspired by Igor here, but it's not unlikely. On the other hand, introducing Musicians/Players into the representational hierarchy is a logical choice once you commit to semantic modelling.

I'm not certain Dorico has a fully semantic model, though it's closer than any other program I know of. LilyPond doesn't, despite its sophisticated batch nature. One telling diagnostic: look at how they handle remembered accidentals for grace notes, and how they treat them rhythmically. Another: how durations are represented. If they're floating-point numbers, they're approximations. For true accuracy in all situations, you need rational numbers – infinite precision, always correct. Anything else eventually leads to problems.

If a program has problems with edge cases or behaves inconsistently when dragging things cross-staff, check how it represents pitch and duration. If floating-point is involved, or rasters of ticks (480 or otherwise), the representation isn't semantic. The program might still handle 95% of hairy accidental placements competently. But when it starts having problems with tied notes across key changes or grace notes at measure starts, you know rules-of-thumb are involved – which means results can never be fully deterministic.

Ooloi is fully semantic with the explicit intention of making results fully deterministic.

This might not matter if you're satisfied with what capable commercial programs achieve today. That's legitimate – they handle about 95% of cases well. But if you depend on the remaining 5%, or if you spend your days as an engraver adjusting those 5% repeatedly, then you understand what I mean by deterministic results saving considerable time.

Now, on to Gould and Ross – books that weren't available when Igor was created. We'd inevitably have implemented their specifications had we had time. But as you know, I was ousted from my own company by venture capital pop zombies before we could. They thought guitar tablature was more important than correct engraver-level beaming.

This time, there will be no guitar tablature at the expense of correct beaming and orthography. All things in their proper order. Lead sheets are kid's stuff, comparatively speaking, and will be added later as plugins.

​Madeleine never existed. Igor Engraver did.

Scottie reconstructs a performance designed to deceive him. I'm reconstructing software that worked perfectly well with the technology it had. Igor Engraver didn't die from technical inadequacy. It died from narcissistic neglect by guys with ponytails who couldn't see past their own reflections.

The architecture was sound. QuickDraw GX handled what we asked of it. Common Lisp did exactly what we needed. The software worked. What failed was human commitment, not technical capability.

Ooloi takes the same architectural vision and asks: what becomes possible when you're free of narcissistic partners and have access to genuinely better tools? The answer: not survival, but fulfilment of what was always possible.

​For, which is important: unlike Scottie, I'm not reconstructing the same woman. That's another significant difference. Igor's strengths lay in its ease of use and its user interface (and its playback, but that's another matter). Ooloi must go much further than Igor ever did in terms of typographical beauty, and it must do so from the first release.

​Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo doesn't just accompany the psychological state; it induces it. Those falling, spiralling arpeggios. Obsessive motifs that keep returning. Chromatic harmonies that never resolve. Lush orchestration that simultaneously feels unstable.

The music is Wagner's Tristan und Isolde transformed – the same chromatic restlessness, the same endless longing, the same refusal to resolve. Wagner created music about impossible love that could never find harmonic rest. Herrmann took that DNA and made it cinematic, made it about obsession itself rather than the object of obsession.

Years ago I quoted four measures from Herrmann's Vertigo in my opera The Maids – using his music about false love to underscore Genet's performed identities. Servants performing their mistress, performing revolution, performing each other. Identity as pure theatrical construction with no stable referent.

The circularity is almost too perfect: the composer of Vertigo scoring the film about vertigo, whose music I once quoted to mark falseness, now frames my own question – whether I'm caught in the same spiral of reconstruction.

But notation software can prove itself. Ooloi either handles Strauss's Elektra without freezing or it doesn't. It either supports real-time collaboration or it doesn't. Unlike Scottie's obsession, mine has to compile.

​This has always been the question. Vertigo asks it. The Maids asks it. Every recursive project asks it.

Is Judy really Judy if she becomes Madeleine? Was Madeleine ever real? Does performed identity become real identity through sufficient commitment? Is Ooloi Igor Engraver, or am I performing the identity of my younger self while building something entirely new?

Most programmers rebuild things pragmatically – new requirements, new tools, new project. But I'm asking whether I'm still the same architect when the materials have completely changed. Whether continuity of vision across technological discontinuity constitutes identity or elaborate self-deception.

The technical choices answer the question.

I preserved the idea: architectural vision, musical semantics, core abstractions, the fundamental insight that notation software requires deeper engineering than the industry has provided. But I let the implementation transform completely: Clojure instead of Common Lisp, STM instead of locks, GPU rendering instead of QuickDraw, immutable data structures, client/server architecture.

That's what genuine identity actually is: essential persistence through necessary transformation.

​Scottie's spiral destroyed him because the object was always false. The reconstruction was doomed because there was nothing real to reconstruct.

My spiral can succeed because the architecture was always sound; what failed was human commitment, not technical possibility. Igor Engraver died from neglect, not inadequacy. The guys with ponytails moved on. I did too,  from the circumstances. But not from the subject.

Twenty-five years later, the obstacles aren't technological maturity – they're human. I can build this alone, without partners whose narcissism exceeds their commitment. I can use tools that are genuinely better (Skia, STM, cloud architecture) without needing them to justify the project's existence.

The obsession is real. The vertigo is real – that uncanny feeling when you realise what was abandoned can be completed. The psychological pattern is acknowledged. But where Scottie's reconstruction existed purely in romantic space with no objective validation, mine has material proof: code that compiles, tests that pass, collaborative editing that actually works, Strauss's Elektra rendering in real time.

Identity is architectural continuity, through material transformation and human liberation. Not performance. Not even evolution. Completion.

The spiral passes the same point, but at a different height. This time, without the ponytails and the pop zombies.

​Vertigo remains my favourite film. I understand Scottie's obsession. I recognise the danger. But I also know the difference between reconstructing what was never real and finishing what should never have been abandoned.

The partners are gone. So are the commercial pressures. The new architecture holds. Herrmann's spiral ends in unresolved ascent – motion without final cadence. Ooloi's must too.

Research for Ooloi’s input system turned up something I hadn’t expected. Igor Engraver’s Flow Mode – the modal, stateful keyboard entry that defined its way of working – has never been recreated. Not by Dorico, not by Sibelius, not by Finale, nor by any of the open-source projects. Twenty-three years on, the idea has simply vanished.

Flow Mode was straightforward. You pressed “.” once and staccato stayed active; crescendo and diminuendo wedges and slurs extended naturally as you continued writing. The commands mapped directly to the symbols – intuitive, fast, and oddly satisfying. When Igor died of business failure in 2001, the method died with it. There is no academic record, no terminology, no sign that anyone even remembered it existed. I had fully expected other programs to have copied this feature; it gives a five- to ten-fold increase in music-entry speed.

Web forums on notation are full of people asking for faster, more fluent keyboard entry, yet without the vocabulary to describe what they want. They are looking for something they have never seen.

So this part of Ooloi isn’t innovation; it’s recovery. The system worked. It was lost for reasons that had nothing to do with design. The decision to re-implement it, and the details, are now recorded in ADR-0032: Ooloi Flow Mode.
​
What remains is to implement it – and to find Magnus Johansson, who just might still have the user manual.

​I'm one of the world's most committed anti-religious people. Despite decades at organ consoles in churches and cathedrals, I stand with Hitchens: religion is humanity's adolescent phase, something we need to outgrow. Its influence is fundamentally harmful.

But when I read something like How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language, I completely understand the reverence the author describes. There's something about Lisp – and Clojure – that creates what you can only call a transcendental response. Nothing actually transcendental happens, of course, but the feeling is real.

What Lisp gives you is freedom. I've written about 'windsurfing through parentheses' before, and the metaphor sticks because it captures something essential. Most programmers are chained to the oars of enterprise slave galleys, with CTOs yelling 'RAMMING SPEED!' like that brilliant scene from Ben-Hur. Meanwhile, those of us who've found Lisp are windsurfing in circles around them, enjoying a freedom they can barely imagine.

The discovery feels like Dave Bowman meeting the monolith: 'My God... it's full of stars!' That vertigo when you realise this thing's inner dimensions vastly exceed its outer ones. Lisp isn't transcendental, but it works like a star gate in both senses. The language doesn't get in your way, and it opens new ways of thinking. At the same time, it's so simple that complexity becomes manageable.

I remember that August 1979 BYTE magazine perfectly. The cover promised mysteries, the articles delivered. I couldn't wait to start implementing what they described – eventually doing it in 6502 assembler, using an assembler I'd written in BASIC.

Everything clicked, even as a teenager. This was real freedom, expressed as code.

Years later, I wrote HotLisp (or 'HotLips' – M.A.S.H. was huge then) for the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. It was incredibly ambitious: a full Common Lisp that treated MIDI events as first-class citizens. Looking back, I see this as the beginning of what became Igor Engraver – integrating music directly into the computational core. We used it to control our Synclavier and MIDI synths whilst teaching algorithmic composition to advanced students at the Royal Academy.

The Two-Bit History article nails something important about Lisp's mystique. It traces the evolution from McCarthy's 'elegant mathematical system' through AI research, Lisp machines, and SICP's role in making it the language that 'teaches you programming's hidden secrets'. Each phase built the reputation.

What the article doesn't cover is the educational betrayal that followed. Computer science departments got it right for a while – they taught Scheme as a first language because it let students focus on learning algorithms rather than wrestling with syntax. Pure freedom to think about problems. Then Java Enterprise was foisted upon the world, the departments caved in, and they started churning out galley slaves instead of computer scientists. I see this as nothing short of high treason.

But here's what really matters: that freedom has evolved in Clojure. Rich Hickey didn't just bring Lisp to the JVM – he solved problems that even Common Lisp couldn't handle elegantly. Those immutable data structures aren't academic toys; they're game changers that eliminate whole categories of bugs whilst making concurrency and parallelism natural instead of terrifying. The effects ripple out: undo/redo becomes trivial, and the JVM gives genuine multi-platform reach.

This isn't just improvement – it's architectural breakthrough disguised as evolution. Clojure keeps Lisp's essential quality (that feeling of discovering how programming should work) whilst solving modern problems McCarthy couldn't have anticipated.

The poor souls in corporate Java shops keep rowing, occasionally granted small mercies as functional concepts trickle in – hints of the freedom they're missing.

I wish they could experience what we know: programming doesn't have to feel like industrial labour. There's a way of working where ideas flow directly into code, where the language becomes transparent, where you stop fighting tools and start windsurfing through solutions.

Maybe that's the point. As McCarthy noted in 1980, Lisp survives not because programmers grudgingly accept it as the best tool for each job, but because it hits 'some kind of local optimum in programming language space'. It endures even though most programmers never touch it, sustained by reports from those who've experienced its particular form of computational enlightenment.

Until we can imagine God creating the world with some newer language – and I doubt that day is coming soon – Lisp isn't going anywhere.

Read the full article at Two-Bit History: https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html

Yesterday’s post was about pitch transposition in Ooloi: how an old Igor Engraver function (printed on a t-shirt, of all places) came back to life in a new context. That work didn’t just solve the mechanics of shifting notes up and down; it reopened the larger question of playback. How do you hear microtonality and advanced humanisation without drowning in technical workarounds?

In Igor, the answer was MIDI. Notes were split across channels, bent into place, reassigned constantly. The result worked, but at the cost of complexity: a “DNA soup” of allocations and pitch-bend tricks. Ingenious, but exhausting.

Ooloi makes a different choice.

With ADR-0027: Plugin-Based Audio Architecture, we draw a line: no MIDI output in the core, no audio generation in the backend. Playback is done entirely through plugins in the frontend. If you want VST/AU instruments, SoundFonts, OSC, or any other output path, you install a plugin. The backend remains what it should be: musical data, collaboration, structure.

This is not just simplification, it’s liberation.

• Microtonality is handled directly in the data model, then played back by plugins without channel gymnastics.
• Humanisation is no longer bound to 7-bit controllers; plugins can drive modern sample libraries with full parameter precision.
• Collaboration becomes clearer: the backend never streams audio, never mangles MIDI, never compromises. Each client handles its own sound.

Put bluntly: we no longer need MIDI as an output protocol. It served its time. For professionals who need nuanced playback, orchestral realism, or contemporary techniques, we now have better tools: VST/AU plugins and beyond.

That said, MIDI output isn’t forbidden. If anyone needs it, a frontend plugin can provide it. For tonal music it will work fine. But if you want advanced humanisation or microtonality, you’ll inherit the need for all the old machinery: channel allocation, pitch-bend acrobatics, the DNA soup. That’s exactly why Ooloi itself doesn’t touch it.

The logic is simple: Ooloi’s core manages music, not sound. Plugins handle playback, and in doing so, they do it better than MIDI ever could.

The DNA soup is gone. What remains is clean, modern, and far more powerful.

​Our solution was elegantly brutal: we seized complete control of attached MIDI units and employed pitch bend to achieve microtonal accuracy. This required distributing notes across MIDI channels according to their pitch bend requirements, using register allocation algorithms borrowed from compiler technology. In a chord containing one microtonally altered note, that note would play on a different channel from its companions. We changed patches frantically and maintained no fixed relationship between instruments and channels – everything existed in a kind of 'DNA soup' where resources were allocated dynamically as needed.

This approach let us extract far more than the nominal sixteen-channel limit from typical MIDI synthesisers. We maintained detailed specifications for every common synthesiser on the market, including how to balance dynamics and handle idiosyncratic behaviours. 

​The system's sophistication extended well beyond pure pitch calculations. When my opera The Maids was commissioned by the Royal Stockholm Opera, I spent considerable time crafting realistic rehearsal tapes. Everything I learned from that process was automated into Igor's playback engine.

We also collaborated with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Musical Acoustics department, led by the legendary Johan Sundberg, whose research had quantified subtle but crucial performance characteristics. Those famous four milliseconds – the consistent temporal offset between soloists and accompaniment in professional orchestras – found their way into our algorithms. Such details proved particularly effective with Schönberg's Hauptstimme markings (𝆦) or similar solo indicators.

We also developed what my composer colleague Anders Hillborg and I privately called 'first performance prophylaxis' – a deliciously cruel setting that simulated the sound of musicians who hadn't practiced. In other words, the kind of sound landscape any composer is used to hearing at a first orchestral rehearsal of a new piece and which always makes you doubt your own talent. Turn this setting up, and you'd hear a characteristically dreadful youth orchestra. Turn it down completely, and you'd get the robotic precision that plagued every other MIDI system. Rather like Karl Richter's Baroque organ recordings.

The humanisation algorithms incorporated realistic instrumental limitations. Passages written too quickly for an instrument would skip notes convincingly. We modelled the typical rhythmic hierarchy of orchestral sections: percussion most precise, then brass, then woodwinds, with strings bringing up the rear. Instruments were panned to their proper orchestral seating positions. Piccolo trills were faster than tuba trills. The result was startlingly realistic, particularly by 1996 standards.

​Now, twenty-five years later, that laundry basket discovery has culminated in ADR 0026: Pitch Representation and Operations, documenting Ooloi's comprehensive pitch representation system. The original Common Lisp has been reborn as Clojure code, with string-based pitch notation ("C#4+25") serving as the canonical format and a factory-based transposition system supporting both chromatic and diatonic modes.

The string representation offers several advantages: compact memory usage for large orchestral scores, direct human readability for debugging, and seamless integration with parsing and caching systems. Most crucially, it supports arbitrary microtonal deviations, something that remains problematic in most contemporary notation software.

The factory pattern generates specialised transposition functions that encapsulate their musical behavior rules through closures. Rather than repeatedly passing configuration parameters, the factory creates efficient, composable functions that understand their specific musical contexts. A diatonic transposer preserves letter-name relationships; a chromatic transposer produces frequency-accurate results with canonical spellings.

The t-shirt in my laundry basket represented more than nostalgic memorabilia; it was unfinished business. That higher-order function embodied a sophisticated understanding of musical mathematics that took a long time to develop and seconds for an AI to recognise as architecturally significant.

Now, with Ooloi's pitch operations properly documented and implemented, that business approaches completion. The code has evolved from promotional garment to production system, carrying forward those insights from 25 years ago into a new, modern technological context.

It's exciting. And still a little unnerving.

​Igor's demise taught me harsh lessons about market timing. When you create genuinely superior tools because existing software actively gets in your way, you discover that technical excellence alone can't guarantee survival.

Igor actually started as freeware – that was my original vision. The VCs wanted features, revenue streams, market capture. I wanted musicians to have tools that actually served their creativity. The collision between these fundamentally incompatible visions, plus the economic chaos after 9/11, killed what could have been transformative.

That experience shaped every decision in Ooloi. This time: transformation through collaboration rather than zero-sum market battles.

The MPL 2.0 licensing reflects this philosophical approach. The core backend becomes commoditised infrastructure; commercial value migrates to sophisticated interfaces, proprietary plugins, premium workflows. What traditional systems charge for – collaboration, large ensemble support, quality rendering – becomes architectural givens.

This isn't theoretical. Martin Keary (Tantacrul), who heads MuseScore development, had been interested in Igor Engraver as a young composer. When we discussed our open source projects, the conversation was refreshingly direct: 'Well, feel free to help yourself to whatever's useful when it goes open source​' – 'Likewise!' Both projects share the belief that notation software shouldn't cost students hundreds of pounds.

This is precisely what I want – for the code to be used, extended, transformed. The platform approach only works if others build on it. That's not threat; it's the point.

​The irony isn't lost on me that companies who once viewed architectural advances as existential threats might ultimately benefit from them. I still recall Sibelius management phoning after Igor's demise to enquire about my plans – ensuring no resurrection attempts, obviously.

Should those companies adopt approaches they once feared, the satisfaction would be collaborative rather than competitive. Success through enabling others, not defeating them.

​Of course, this depends on Ooloi actually working. Functional programming should provide significant performance benefits, but what happens with complex layout calculations across a hypercomplex 100-staff score by Brian Ferneyhough (whom I had as guest teacher at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm back in the day) whilst maintaining real-time collaboration?

The arrogance in predicting that these approaches will outperform decades of commercial development is considerable. My instincts could be spectacularly wrong – though they've been reliable enough to spot architectural dead ends before they become obvious to everyone else.

That's the architect's bargain: trust your reasoning, build on principles, prepare to be surprised.

"Next-generation" gets thrown around as a PR term so casually it's meaningless. If Ooloi genuinely represents next-generation architecture, that should be inherent in the platform design rather than claimed through marketing. The question isn't whether Ooloi calls itself next-gen, but whether others build on it in ways that would have been impossible previously.

Perhaps this time, it might be composed collaboratively.

Ooloi isn't here to "disrupt" anything. I despise that cheap neoliberal selfishness. It aims to transform, to evolve, to open possibilities. But there's no will to conquer — it's simply not in its DNA.

​At some point, the question will be asked: “Isn’t this all a bit over-engineered?”

Multicore parallelism; Software Transactional Memory; gRPC; GPU acceleration; a plugin system designed as a first-class citizen rather than a bolted-on afterthought; an asynchronous server/client architecture with specialised streaming features. Prometheus monitoring. For music notation software, that can sound excessive.

But that assumption is exactly why notation software has been failing composers for decades. Not because it was too ambitious, but because it was chronically under-engineered.

Text editors are linear: O(n). Basically, what they handle is a string of characters broken up into lines. Music notation, on the other hand, is two-dimensional, contextual, and computationally explosive. Synchronising voices, aligning dozens of staves, resolving collisions, spacing measures, redrawing in real time: these are quadratic and cubic problems (O(n²), O(n³)), with NP-hard layout challenges in the general case.
​
That's why scrolling takes seconds. That's why orchestral scores become unusable. And that's why the industry has spent thirty years patching symptoms instead of tackling the cause.

​Look at the record:

• Sibelius: selecting a single note in an orchestral score can take several seconds.
• Finale: collapsed under its own weight, with delays of 5–90 seconds for basic actions.
• MuseScore: freezes completely on Strauss’s Elektra. (They all do.)
• Dorico: more modern, but still lags 15–40 seconds on large scores.

And here is the deeper problem: users have learned to accept this. They zoom in to a handful of staves, scroll in slow motion, restart their program every quarter of an hour. They've accepted that the fundamentals can't be solved. A whole profession has normalised working around performance breakdowns as if they were laws of nature.

They're not inevitable. They're the result of decades of under-engineering.

​The remedies weren't always available. In the 1980s SCORE capped out at 32 staves because 640 KB of memory left no room for orchestral complexity. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Finale and Sibelius (and Igor Engraver!) wrestled with single-threaded designs on single-core CPUs. Even into the 2010s, GPU rendering pipelines were immature, and most concurrency models in mainstream languages couldn't be trusted in production.

Only recently have the necessary ingredients converged:

• Affordable multicore hardware on every laptop, making parallel measure formatting possible.
• GPU-accelerated rendering (Skia) for fluid scrolling and zooming in real time.
• Mature concurrency models such as Clojure’s Software Transactional Memory, providing safe lock-free collaboration.
• Immutable data structures that give transactional clarity to complex notation states.
• JVM interoperability that allows plugin developers to work in their own languages.

This is why Ooloi is written in Clojure. Not because of language fashion, but because Clojure can orchestrate this synergy.

​Ooloi is designed to solve these problems at the root:

• Parallel layout: every core formats measures simultaneously.
• STM transactions: true collaborative editing without locks, with automatic retries on conflict.
• GPU Skia rendering: zooming and scrolling at video-game speed.
• Plugin-first design: developers work with a clean musical API, not concurrency primitives or network plumbing.

To musicians, Ooloi looks like a normal application. To plugin developers, it feels like writing musical logic in their favourite JVM language. The hard problems are solved once in the core, so nobody else has to live with them.

​So no, Ooloi isn't over-engineered. It's appropriately engineered for a domain that has been persistently underestimated. The remedies only became possible recently, when the technology finally caught up.

I simply happen to live at the intersection of deep architectural knowledge and deep musical knowledge, with the scars (also deep) of having done this before. Ooloi isn't the product of singular genius: it's the moment when the right tools finally aligned with the right problem.

The proof won't be in a benchmark or an ADR alone. It'll be when musicians can finally edit, scroll, and collaborate on large-scale scores without breaking their creative flow.

​Ooloi will be open source by design. The complexity is in the foundations so that musicians, teachers, students, and developers don't have to deal with it. Plugin writers don't need to care about concurrency or transactions: they work with measures, staves, and voices in a musical API. Most contributors will never touch the Clojure core, and they won't need to.

This is a gift to the community: an infrastructure platform built to be extended. The aim is simple: to finally make notation software scale to the real demands of music, and to give others the foundation to build what I alone never could.

I've had numerous requests over the years to publicly tell the story about how and why NoteHeads, the company I founded to develop Igor Engraver, collapsed in the early 2000s. I've never done so as it never was that important, but now, with Ooloi on the horizon (however it's going to turn out) it's crucial that it isn't perceived a revenge project. It's not; it's simply closure in Clojure. With interest in Ooloi building, I've decided it's time to tell my side of the story. In doing so, I had to name names – an unproblematic decision as this was, after all, nearly 30 years ago. I've moved on, and I'm sure everybody else has too.

Prologue: The Auction
Picture this scene: a solicitor's office near Stockholm's Stureplan in late 2001. In one room sit Christer Sturmark – future secular humanist celebrity – and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA fame, who never spoke, moved, or changed his facial expression during the entire process. Ice-cold pop star. In another, I sit alone, connected by crackling international phone lines to Los Angeles, where Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of the world's greatest conductors, waits to learn the fate of software he too has invested in. Salonen, in turn, has Randy Newman on the line, film composer and subsequently Oscar winner and also a share holder.

This auction represents the musical world's last desperate attempt to save work that the financial world had already written off. By the end of that surreal session, they had acquired Igor Engraver and NoteHeads Musical Expert Systems for a paltry 200,000 SEK. I received not a penny.

What followed was an instructive disaster: the systematic destruction of genuinely revolutionary music software by what can only be described as a cavalcade of ideologues, incompetents, and narcissists who fundamentally misunderstood what they had purchased.

​What We Built: Software That Thought Like Musicians
Igor Engraver, launched in 1996, was genuinely ahead of its time. Unlike conventional music notation programs that trapped users in rigid 'modes', Igor worked the way musicians actually think – like composing with pen and music paper, but with the power of computation behind it. Many aspects of its humanised MIDI playback haven't been rivalled in terms of realism to this very day.

The concept was sufficiently sophisticated to attract some of the finest programming minds available: Common Lisp developers who grasped the elegant abstractions immediately. Common Lisp wasn't common then; finding programmers who could think in its functional paradigms was difficult. But when you found them, they understood instantly what we were trying to achieve.

Professional musicians recognised the difference. Even today, in 2025, I receive occasional messages from musicians who miss Igor and wonder whether they can somehow run the now-ancient program in emulators or simulators. This isn't mere nostalgia; it's testimony to software that solved problems other programs didn't even recognise.

​Strategic Missteps: When Money Doesn't Understand Music
But ideological programmers weren't our only challenge. Feature creep, driven by investors who fundamentally misunderstood our market, began to derail our development timeline. I remember one VC board member declaring: 'Igor will be unsellable unless it has guitar tablature for pop music'.

I resisted strenuously. Igor Engraver was designed for serious composition work - the kind that attracted interest from conductors like Salonen and composers like Newman. Adding pop guitar tablature would delay our core engine whilst appealing to a completely different market segment. We risked losing our competitive advantage in professional notation to chase a crowded amateur market.

But the VC bastards persisted, and eventually prevailed. Had we stuck to the original plan, we would have delivered Igor 1.0 well before Sibelius completed their rewrite and hit the market. Instead, we found ourselves implementing features that diluted our core value proposition whilst our window of opportunity slowly closed.

This painful lesson directly influenced Ooloi's architecture years later – I designed its plugin system to integrate so tightly with the core engine that specialised features can be added without delaying or compromising the fundamental software. Those who want guitar tablature can have it; those who don't aren't forced to wait for it.

​Sources

• Magnus Johansson's testimony in Realtid: 'Noteheads customers were furious with Sturmark'

After a year building the backend of Ooloi with Claude, I’ve learned this:

Successful AI collaboration isn’t about creative freedom. It’s about harsh constraint.

AI will overstep. Your job is to correct it—immediately, uncompromisingly.
The friction isn’t failure. It’s the method.

Read the full piece – which I asked the AI to write in its own voice – here.

Now that the backend engine is complete, architecturally speaking, I'm getting increasingly eager to open the source. Itching, in fact. But as that will take a while, the least I can do for you is give you the WELCOME.md file from the source repo. 

​/ Peter

It's no secret that I use Generative AI, specifically Claude Sonnet, to assist with the Ooloi project. I use it for writing Clojure tests TDD fashion, for generating Clojure code, for generating documentation, READMEs, architectural design documents and much more.

Above all, I use Claude for exploring architectural strategies before coding even begins. It's somewhat reminiscent of pair programming in that sense: I'd never just task GenAI with generating anything I wouldn't scrutinise very carefully. This approach works very well and allows me to quickly pick up on good design patterns and best practices for Clojure.

It then continued, quoting the code base:

I guess this answers my question about Clojure vs Python. It's not just the functional and immutable aspects of Clojure, it's also specifying the domain stringently through design, architectural discussons, specs, and tests.
​

I continued: "I also use Claude to create ADRs, READMEs, introductions for newcomers, Dev plans, etc. I'm quite open about this; transparency is paramount in an open-source project, and the idea is to facilitate collaborators' understanding of the Ooloi project as much as possible. This means that adherence to best practices, the use of sane architecture, abstracting away the complex stuff without compromising on performance or flexibility, etc, all are central."

Claude responded:

We then went on discussing open-source strategies, tutorials and onboarding materials for contributors and much more which I'll spare you from for now.

​Finally, I asked it to summarise its views on Ooloi as a project:

Now, this level of enthusiasm and praise from an anthropomorphic-presenting LLM (essentially a glorified Markov chain) always makes me deeply suspicious – I'm absolutely allergic to toxic positivity, especially the kind from the USA – so I asked it "Are you sure you're not overly enthusiastic just to please me?". It replied:

I then asked Claude 3.7 to comment on my journey from Common Lisp to Clojure and on the influence from Common Lisp and CLOS on Ooloi:

And finally, I just couldn't resist asking: "What would Rich Hickey say?"

I guess that hypothetical assessment is good enough for me at this point. Still not quite sure that Claude isn't giving me a friendly reach-around, though... ;)

A recent question in the Clojurians Slack channel caught me off guard when I was asked to compare FrankenScore to Sibelius. This request for a direct comparison not only made me pause but also brought back memories of Igor Engraver's rivalry with Sibelius – a competition that once saw Sibelius's own CEO defect to our side. However, that was a long time ago. Now, as FrankenScore carries forward Igor's legacy, I was challenged to articulate our unique value proposition in this new era.

​Here's how I responded:

NN:
Hey, that looks promising! What are the advantages it will have compared to Sibelius?

Peter Bengtson:
Wow, that's actually a pretty multi-faceted question. While we're still in development and can't yet offer a feature-by-feature comparison with Sibelius, I can highlight some key advantages we're aiming for:
​

1. Open-source: FrankenScore will be open-source, allowing for community-driven development and customisation. This should enable faster evolution and adaptation to user needs.
2. Modern architecture: Built with Clojure, it leverages functional programming paradigms that offer benefits in areas like concurrency and data processing. This leads to better performance, especially for complex scores. FrankenScore is explicitly designed to support very large scores.
3. Truly cross-platform: Frankenscore will run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
4. User experience focus: We're recreating the intuitive interface and multi-modal input mode that Igor Engraver was well known for (and which Sibelius partly copied – unsuccessfully – after Igor's demise). This allows a musician to input music easily and very quickly just like with pen and paper, without switching between tools. The result is an enhanced creative process that flows naturally, rather than one hindered by arbitrary technological barriers.
5. Extensible plugin system: FrankenScore consists of a small, highly efficient core, augmented with plugins. It will support both open-source and commercial closed-source plugins, written in any JVM language. Plugins run on the same terms as the core and are an important and integral part of the architecture, not an afterthought. The API is highly abstract and takes care of all the low-level details such as transactions and thread-safety so that plugin developers can concentrate on functionality. Writing plugins for FrankenScore should be a doddle.
6. Full SMuFL font support: Unlike Sibelius, FrankenScore makes full use of the capabilities of SMuFL music fonts.
7. Collaborative features: We're exploring real-time collaboration possibilities to enhance how musicians work together on scores. This is possible since FrankenScore uses a server/client architecture.

​Importantly, as an open-source project, FrankenScore will be free to use. Many music departments struggle with excessive license costs.
​
For those interested in more details, ooloi.org contains a wealth of information about the project, its goals, and its technical underpinnings.

In the past weeks, I've been focused on FrankenScore's core architecture. I'm not rushing to open-source this; instead, I'm taking my time to craft a solid platform that will do the heavy lifting for future users and collaborators. All the complexities involving data representation and manipulation in a multi-threaded environment must be solved so collaborators can concentrate on the essentials. Clojure is ideal here, just as Common Lisp was the clear choice for Igor Engraver back in 1996.

Key developments:

1. The API is now fully polymorphic and can be used in the same way internally in the backend as in the frontend. There is a system of pointerless vector path descriptors (VPDs) implemented for this purpose that all API operations can accept as part of their polymorphic setup. I wouldn't be surprised if core collaborators will use the API for internal purposes as well, as it is highly efficient and exposes the underlying functionality in an abstract, domain-specific way. There should be little need to go directly to the underlying data structures, at least not for speed - and certainly not for expressivity. This also bodes well for plugin development in other languages than Clojure, which is an important feature.

2. This beast is fast. Clojure's STM facilities ensure high-speed ACID-compliant transactions with automatic retries. They are also composable. This means that plugins can bombard the backend with hundreds of thousands of mutation requests, for instance to implement MusicXML, with the same efficiency as the pure Clojure backend.

3. Piece Manager Implementation: There's now a Piece Manager, providing functions for storing, retrieving, and resolving pieces from IDs. This allows for multiple clients to work simultaneously on the same piece in a distributed arrangement. The FrankenScore backend can run in the cloud with multiple people collaborating on the same piece. Multiple pieces can be open simultaneously to allow copy-and-paste operations between them.

My next steps involve implementing file persistence (saving and opening music files), as well as tackling printing. These are foundational features, not mere add-ons. Persistence forces a clear definition of the data model and enables easier testing. Printing isn't just about output; it's about representation and serves as a sanity check on the entire system design. Both will likely inform further refinements of the core architecture, potentially revealing oversights or opportunities for optimisation.

Additionally, sequencing is a crucial part of the core platform. And by sequencing I mean support for converting musical representations to timed sound events - though not necessarily via MIDI; a software synth may use direct means of control, for instance. The core sequencer can be used by plugins to generate MIDI, or to input MIDI, but the actual MIDI implementation will be done in the plugin layer. But that's a whole blog post of its own.

Twenty-five years ago, I embarked on a journey to revolutionise music notation software with Igor Engraver. Today, I'm resurrecting that spirit with FrankenScore. But why now? Why breathe new life into a project that's been dormant for a quarter-century?

A Vision Deferred

Igor Engraver was always meant to be freeware, a tool for musicians and composers to express their creativity without financial barriers. Commercial considerations, however, steered us away from that vision. Now, with FrankenScore, we're returning to those roots by embracing open-source development. This aligns with my original intentions and the spirit of accessibility that drove Igor Engraver's creation.

The Tech Landscape: Then and Now

Back in '96, when Igor Engraver was born, the technological landscape was vastly different:

• OS X hadn't been released
• Most computers were single-core
• Software was largely platform-specific
• Clojure, our chosen language for FrankenScore, didn't exist

Today, we have multi-core processors, cross-platform development tools, and languages like Clojure that offer powerful abstractions and concurrent programming models. These advancements allow us to build FrankenScore as a more robust, efficient, and flexible tool than was possible with Igor Engraver.

The State of Music Notation Software

Igor Engraver was conceived because the available options at the time – Finale (as user-friendly as a cactus) and Sibelius (marginally better) – weren't up to the task. They fell short in usability, flexibility, and output quality.

I hated using Finale (and I've written an entire opera in it). Instead of enhancing your creativity – which, at the end of the day, is what a music processor should do – Finale and all other similar programs hampered your creativity.

Surprisingly, a quarter-century later, the field hasn't progressed as much as you might expect. While there have been improvements – some of them clearly inspired by Igor Engraver! – there's still a significant gap between what's available and what's possible.

Why FrankenScore, Why Now?

The time is ripe for FrankenScore, and I can't help but feel a sense of excitement and purpose. We're at a unique intersection of technological readiness and persistent unmet needs in the music notation world. The tools and platforms available to us now make it possible to build something truly revolutionary – a modern, efficient, and cross-platform solution that was merely a dream when Igor Engraver was conceived.

What strikes me is how, despite the passage of time, the music notation software landscape still leaves much to be desired, especially in terms of usability and flexibility. It's both frustrating and motivating. But here's the kicker – we now have this thriving open-source ecosystem at our fingertips. It's the perfect environment for collaborative development and continuous improvement, something I could only have wished for back in the day.

There's also a personal element to this timing. I feel a renewed focus, unburdened by the commercial constraints that ultimately derailed Igor Engraver. We can, as a community, now pour our energy into creating the best possible tool for musicians and composers, staying true to the original vision of accessibility and innovation. And you know what? Those years weren't wasted. The experiences from Igor Engraver – our successes, our setbacks, the lessons learned – they're all invaluable insights that we're bringing to FrankenScore's development. It's like we're picking up where we left off, but with 25 years of additional wisdom and technological advancements in our toolkit.

FrankenScore isn't just a revival; it's a reimagining. We're taking the core ideas that made Igor Engraver revolutionary and implementing them with modern technology and development practices. Our goal is to create a music notation tool that's not just incrementally better, but fundamentally transforms how musicians interact with notation software.

We're excited to embark on this journey, and we invite you – musicians, developers, and enthusiasts – to join us in shaping the future of music notation software. Together, let's bring Igor Engraver's vision to life in FrankenScore.

​25 years ago, in the last millennium, we created Igor Engraver, a revolutionary music notation software. To promote our work, we printed t-shirts that showcased our dual perspectives: the musician's view and the developer's view. On one side of the t-shirt, we had beautifully printed sheet music titled "Your View." On the other side, titled "Our View," we displayed a piece of code—a higher-order function for creating a transposer function in Common Lisp.

Fast forward to today, as I embark on revivifying these ideas as the open source project "FrankenScore: a Body Resurrected", I suddenly remembered those t-shirts and the key they held to a general pitch representation covering not only diatonic and chromatic but also microtonal music and its transposition. I recalled that I had kept one of these t-shirts.

After searching through my entire flat, I finally found it at the bottom of my laundry basket. Remarkably, the quality of the print has survived 25 years! I took a photo of the t-shirt and fed it into ChatGPT, leading to a fruitful conversation about the ideas behind and generality of this pitch representation.

Thus: document your ideas in whatever way you want - even on t-shirts. Twenty-five years later, if the fabric and print are good enough, they may become the foundation stones on your journey of ... developmental retribution? ;)