Liskov Wins Turing

Prof. Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award, often described as the Nobel Prize of computer science. This was great news to hear because Prof. Liskov was another of my very influential professors at MIT.

When I was an MIT sophomore, I took a prototype of the class that would eventually become 6.170, MIT's Laboratory in Software Engineering. In this class, Prof. Liskov taught us about data abstraction, perhaps the most fundamental of the concepts that came to be known as object-oriented programming. She eventually designed a computer language, CLU, that directly supported data abstraction, and I programmed in CLU for my M.S. research work at MIT. But at this point, data abstraction was new and there were no languages to support it directly. So we learned how to approximate data abstraction using the traditional PL/1 language. This was a lesson that came in very handy in the years when programming needed to be done in older languages like C and Pascal. Eventually, languages like Java, C++, and Visual Basic came into widespread use with built-in support for data abstraction.

This was only my fourth programming class - I had one class in high school and two as an MIT freshman - and it had the biggest projects I had programmed to that time. So it was a tremendous boon to get the ideas of data abstraction into my software development repertoire at an early age.

Thanks, Prof. Liskov, for your great teaching in my undergraduate and graduate years at MIT. Enjoy your richly-deserved award!

Dolet 4.7 for Finale Now Available

Recordare has released version 4.7 of our Dolet for Finale plug-in. The big new feature in this release is support for reading and writing Open Score Format (OSF) files.

Open Score Format is a new format for distribution, interchange, and archiving of musical scores. Based on the MusicXML 2.0 format, it adds new features for structured metadata, digital signing, improved multimedia packages, and profiles for common content types. The latest 0.9.1 beta has also been published on the SourceForge site.

Open Score Format was initially developed by a consortium of organizations with interests in the digital music publishing industry, including Hal Leonard, MakeMusic, Music Sales, Recordare, and Yamaha.

EMI Digital Shakeup

It's been interesting watching EMI's digital efforts from afar. Here was a record label that actually hired people like Douglas Merrill and Cory Ondrejka with flashy Silicon Valley high-tech resumes and chartered them to start innovating in digital sales and marketing of music. Both Merrill and Ondrejka blogged about their hiring.

The immediate red flag that went up for me was that neither Merrill nor Ondrejka are musicians, nor did they have experience in music software or music representation technology. If all you want to do is build a basic music e-commerce site, that's not a big problem. But if you want to innovate in digital music, it seems you are tying your hands behind your back without senior people who have deep experience with both technology and music.

I have not met either Mr. Merrill or Mr. Ondrejka. From their track records it seems safe to assume that they are very bright people. But domain experience really does help tremendously in application software development, and the more specialized your domain the more valuable this experience becomes. In Mr. Merrill's blog post, you can see that he worried about this too.

Many musicians have a well-deserved distrust of software tech people - whether due to music business issues, or wondering why the music software they are using is driving them crazy. It certainly has helped Recordare and MusicXML to be able to point to my musical resume (singing in opera and symphony choruses, playing trumpet on orchestral CDs still in print today) as well as my professional technical resume. Nearly everybody developing software at companies like MakeMusic and the Sibelius unit at Avid can make similar claims, whatever genre of music they perform. The need may not seem so obvious for music sales and marketing software as for music notation software, but that might be a case of not knowing what you don't know.

So now Mr. Merrill is leaving EMI after less than a year. From my corporate experience, this looks related to Guy Hands's decreasing involvement at EMI, since the reports were that Hands hired Merrill for the job. Mr. Ondrejka has been promoted, though to a position that has a lower-level title than Mr. Merrill had. I'm still waiting to see a record label make a high-level technology hire of someone who is deeply experienced in music and software, separately and together. The payoff would be even better for a group like EMI that includes music publishing too. Perhaps this has already happened, but in a lower profile fashion?

Coming Up: Palo Alto Chamber Chorus

Most of my performing these days is usually in symphonic and opera choruses. I sang in two chamber choruses back in Boston, but have yet to find a good fit with a full-time chamber chorus locally.

So I am really enjoying our rehearsals with the 15 singers of the Palo Alto Chamber Chorus. Most of the group also sings (now or in the recent past) with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus or West Bay Opera. We'll be singing Mozart's Missa brevis in D, K. 194 with the Baroque Concerto Ensemble under James Frieman's direction. The concert is Sunday, March 15 at 7:30 pm at the Palo Alto Art Center. The rest of the program includes music by Vivaldi and Elgar, directed by Joyce Malick. Admission is free!

Force Quit and Move to Trash

Well, this is a natural topic for this blog! First of all, U2's new album No Line on the Horizon is very good indeed. U2 albums take time to reveal the full depth of their charms, and I'm only on the second listening. But "Moment of Surrender" in particular is immediately enchanting, and it's a good sign that most every song sounds better on second hearing than first.

What make this album irresistible for a blog about music and software are the Mac OS GUI shout-outs in the song "Unknown Caller." Force quit and move to trash indeed. Computer applications like e-mail and web browsing have made it into pop song lyrics for quite a while now. One of my favorites is from Joe Jackson: "He says that she's jealous just like a female / She says I caught you, I went through your e-mail." But what other rock stars have put GUI command names in their songs? If you know, please comment here!