Music sequencer
[note 1][1] The advent of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and the Atari ST home computer in the 1980s gave programmers the opportunity to design software that could more easily record and play back sequences of notes played or programmed by a musician.
This software also improved on the quality of the earlier sequencers which tended to be mechanical sounding and were only able to play back notes of exactly equal duration.
There are still also standalone hardware MIDI sequencers, although the market demand for those has diminished greatly due to the greater feature set of their software counterparts.
It is designed for both composition and live performance; users can change the musical notes at any time without regarding recording mode.
Typically, analog sequencers are used to generate repeated minimalistic phrases which may be reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder or trance music.
For editing, usually "punch in/punch out" features originated in the tape recording are provided, although it requires sufficient skills to obtain the desired result.
As early as the 9th century, the Persian (Iranian) Banū Mūsā brothers invented a hydropowered organ using exchangeable cylinders with pins,[8] and also an automatic flute-playing machine using steam power,[9][10] as described in their Book of Ingenious Devices.
The drawn sound technique which appeared in the late 1920s, is notable as a precursor of today's intuitive graphical user interfaces.
In this technique, notes and various sound parameters are triggered by hand-drawn black ink waveforms directly upon the film substrate, hence they resemble piano rolls (or the 'strip charts' of the modern sequencers/DAWs).
The "Wall of Sound", once covered on the wall of his studio in New York during the 1940s–1950s, was an electro-mechanical sequencer to produce rhythmic patterns, consisting of stepping relays (used on dial pulse telephone exchange), solenoids, control switches, and tone circuits with 16 individual oscillators.
Also, the rotating speed of the arm was controlled via the brightness of lights, and as a result, arbitrary rhythms were generated.
[verification needed] On its prototype, a theremin manufactured by young Robert Moog was utilized to enable portamento over 3-octave range, and on later version, it was replaced by a pair of photographic film and photocell for controlling the pitch by voltage.
[22] In 1968, Ralph Lundsten and Leo Nilsson had a polyphonic synthesizer with sequencer called Andromatic built for them by Erkki Kurenniemi.
[31] In 1957 Max Mathews at Bell Labs wrote MUSIC, the first widely used program for sound generation, and a 17-second composition was performed by the IBM 704 computer.
The Synclavier I, released in September 1977,[51] was one of the earliest digital music workstation product with multitrack sequencer.
Synclavier series evolved throughout the late-1970s to the mid-1980s, and they also established integration of digital-audio and music-sequencer, on their Direct-to-Disk option in 1984, and later Tapeless Studio system.
[53] To program the synthesizer, Yamaha built a custom computer workstation designed to be used as a sequencer for the GS-1[citation needed][failed verification].
[44] Since its introduction, MIDI has remained the musical instrument industry standard interface through to the present day.
Modern computer digital audio software after the 2000s, such as Ableton Live, incorporates aspects of sequencers among many other features.
[clarification needed] In 1978, Japanese personal computers such as the Hitachi Basic Master equipped the low-bit D/A converter to generate sound which can be sequenced using Music Macro Language (MML).
[32] It was not until the advent of MIDI, introduced to the public in 1983, that general-purpose computers really started to play a role as software sequencers.
[63][61] Also in 1983, Roland Corporation's CMU-800 sound module introduced music synthesis and sequencing to the PC, Apple II,[64] and Commodore 64.
