SCAMP is an computer-assisted composition framework in Python designed to act as a hub, flexibly connecting the composer-programmer to a wide variety of resources for playback and notation. SCAMP allows the user to manage the flow of musical time, play notes either using FluidSynth or via MIDI or OSC messages to an external synthesizer, and ultimately quantize and export the result to music notation in the form of MusicXML or Lilypond. Overall, the framework aims to address pervasive technical challenges while imposing as little as possible on the aesthetic choices of the composer-programmer.
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Flexible and extensible playback: Although SCAMP comes with a basic general MIDI soundfont, any .sf2 or .sf3 soundfont can be used, and playback can also include MIDI or OSC messages to external programs or synthesizers, which effectively offers limitless sonic possibilities.
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Note-based, but in a broad sense: Although SCAMP conceives of music in terms of notes, notes in SCAMP are extremely flexible sound-objects that can include the continuous evolution of arbitrary playback parameters.
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Effortless microtonality: to play the G above middle C 30 cents sharp, the user has only to use the MIDI pitch 67.3. Behind the scenes, SCAMP manages all the MIDI pitchbend messages, placing notes on separate channels where necessary so that these messages do not conflict.
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Effortless playback of glissandi and dynamic envelopes. Both pitch and volume can follow arbitrary curves defined using the expenvelope package.
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Flexible and precise polyphonic tempo control using clockblocks. In SCAMP, different layers of music moving at different tempi can be interwoven with one another while remaining coordinated. Smooth accelerandi and ritardandi are possible, and the resulting music can be quantized according to the tempo of any layer.
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Sensible and flexible quantization. The user has a fine degree of control over how rhythms are quantized and over the degree of complexity in the resulting notation.
Compositional tools always feature some degree of trade-off between functionality and freedom; every feature that is made available to the user steers them in a certain direction. For instance, if a framework provides abstractions for manipulating harmonies, the user may find themselves (perhaps unconsciously) pushed in the direction of a particular harmonic language. While this may be a worthwhile trade-off in many cases, it is not the goal of SCAMP. Here, the goal is to provide general purpose tools, to remove the drudgery of implementing practical functionality that is needed again and again. Beyond this scope, users are encouraged to write and share their own extensions to suit their own compositional inclinations. (Several such extensions are available in the scamp_extensions package.)
Other key values underlying this framework are:
- Playback first, notation second: SCAMP has been designed so that the user interacts with an ensemble, not a score. This way, ideas can be quickly auditioned and iterated over based on the sonic result. Once the result is deemed satisfactory, the user can then export it as music notation.
- Compact and expressive code: Efforts have been made to make user code simple, yet powerful. One of the ways this is accomplished is through sensible defaults; although there is a lot of functionality under the hood, it shouldn't be encountered by the user until it is needed.
- Modularity and adherence as much as possible to the Unix Philosophy. SCAMP bundles a number of tools together for convenience, but it may be more than a given user needs. For this reason, the MusicXML export capability is available separately as pymusicxml, the flexible musical Envelope class is available separately as expenvelope, and the system for managing musical time is available separately as clockblocks.
On a properly configured computer, installing SCAMP is as simple as opening a terminal and running:
pip3 install --user scamp
(This installs it for a single user. To install it for all users on a computer, use sudo pip3 install scamp and enter your administrator password.)
Properly configuring your computer involves:
- Installing Python 3.6 or greater
- (Linux only) Installing FluidSynth
- (Optional) Installing python-rtmidi
- (Optional) Installing abjad and LilyPond
Each of these steps is described in greater detail below. After configuring the computer and
running pip3 install --user scamp, you should be able to test the installation by:
- Opening a terminal and typing
python3to start an interactive python session. - Typing in
from scamp import test_run; test_run.play()and pressing return.
If you here a piano gesture sweeping inward towards middle C, SCAMP has installed correctly!
Mac
You can download and install Python 3 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/. After installation, open up a terminal and type:
python3 --version
You should be greeted with "Python 3.10" or something similar in response. If so, you're all set! If you get something like "command not found" instead, it's likely that something went wrong in the process of installation.
Windows
As on a Mac, you can download and install Python 3 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/.
In the installer, be sure to select "Add Python 3.10 to PATH". This allows you to invoke python from the Command Prompt
by typing either python or py, and this should also default to the latest version of python. Test that all went
according to plan by typing:
python --version
You should be greeted with "Python 3.10" or something similar in response. If so, you're all set! For all other installation instructions below, use python instead of python3 and pip instead of pip3.
Linux
On Linux, Python 3.10 or greater is often already installed by default. Again, you can check this by opening a terminal and running:
python3 --version
If your version of python is already 3.10 or greater, you're good to go. However, if your version of Python 3 is less than 3.10, you will have to install python 3.10 or higher, e.g. from a third party PPA.
SCAMP requires FluidSynth for soundfont playback, but on both Mac and Windows — due to the lack of a default package manager — it became clear that the path of least resistance was to include the compiled FluidSynth library within the SCAMP package. For this reason, you don't need to take the step of installing FluidSynth to use SCAMP on Mac or Windows.
Since Linux distros have package managers, it makes more sense to have users take the extra step to install FluidSynth that way. On apt-based distros like Debian and Ubuntu, it's as simple as running:
sudo apt install fluidsynth
You are now the proud owner of a FluidSynthesizer!
For midi input, and also to generate an outgoing midi stream (which could, for instance, be routed to a DAW), you will need the python-rtmidi library. You can get this by running from a terminal:
pip3 install --user python-rtmidi
On Linux, if you're running into an error you may need to first install the python3-dev
package, for instance with the command:
sudo apt install python3-dev
For any other python-rtmidi installation woes, take a look at the installation instructions here.
For LilyPond output, you will need the abjad library. To do so, run the following:
pip3 install abjad
Note that abjad sometimes changes in a way that breaks compatibility with SCAMP. If you are using a version of abjad that is more recent than the one SCAMP was tested with, a warning will indicate this fact when you try to use it to generate notation.
After installing abjad, you will also need to download and install LilyPond, since it is a dependency of abjad.
The scamp_extensions package is the place for models of music-theoretical concepts (e.g. scales, pitch-class sets), additional conveniences for interacting with various types of input and output, and in general anything that builds upon SCAMP but is outside of the scope of the main framework.
The easiest way to install scamp_extensions is by running the command:
pip3 install --user scamp_extensions
To install the most up-to-date version (assuming you have git installed), you can instead run:
pip3 install --user git+https://git.sr.ht/~marcevanstein/scamp_extensions
This will install the latest version from this repository.