Then, in the fall of 1975, Ted Kaehler, although no musician himself, developed a program called “Twang.” This was a visual interface to a number of music synthesizer programs that could capture, compose, edit, and replay music on the Alto. Twang used a nontraditional notation, black bars of differing lengths and locations to indicate differing tonic and rhythmic values, that deliberately resembled the perforations on a player piano roll. Twang was unusual in that it worked virtually in real time. All previous computer music programs, including the pioneering “FM” developed by John Chowning at
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