Music Macro Language

Early automatic music generation functions were used in arcade video games, which used many computer sounds.

The Intel 8253 Mode 3 Square Wave generator was used for music, in the Kit computer MZ-40K (Microcomputer Doctor (マイコン博士/まいこんはかせ, Maikon Hakase)) by SHARP Corporation, made in Japan at May 1978.

The first commands for classical MML appeared in the internal architecture of the SP-1002 MONITOR IOCS[3] and SP-5001 BASIC Operating Systems on the MZ-80K 8-bit[4] computer.

[8] Modern MML originally appeared in Microsoft BASIC and was common in the early 1970s and 1980s on 8-bit and 16-bit era Japanese personal computers.

MML code has a simple text format whereby letters and numbers are used to describe the musical notes to be played.

[9] In addition, various implementations of MML add system extensions allowing parameters of audio synthesis to be altered with specialized commands or to simplify the entry of common musical figures such as arpeggios.

[16] Standard Musical eXpression (SMX) is a variant of Modern MML provided by Microsoft in QBASIC, BASICA, and GW-BASIC's PLAY statement.

[9] The version used by GW-BASIC is part of the modern BSDs, FreeBSD,[17] NetBSD, OpenBSD, and MirOS; see speaker(4) for the language.