The idea that computers can generate music, depending on what perspective you look at it, can either be interesting and helpful or disturbing and pervasive. Usually with the aim of making processes faster, musical computer applications have ranged from recording and processing to even composition itself. While some who have embraced composition using a computer have proclaimed that it helps shape new ideas, others have no taste for it, accusing it as non-musical and reduces man to a mere encoder. Whether or not you hold one of these opinions, it's interesting that the continuous push of music in computers is evident as music is a quantifiable numerical concept. Taking advantage of this concept and bringing aid to new composers is a command-line based algorithmic composition environment called Flexatone h.f.p. AthenaCL.

AthenaCL is a object-oriented composition tool that can be scripted and embedded, and includes integrated instrument libraries, post-tonal and microtonal pitch modeling tools, multiple-format graphical outputs, and musical output in Csound, MIDI, audio file, XML, and text formats. Musical parts are deployed as Textures which are layered surface-defining objects containing numerous independent ParameterObjects to control pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, panning, and instrument (Csound) parameters. Those of you who have been using Csound will find that its applications are familiar. Algorithmic models such as Stochastic, Xenakis Sieve, Markov-based, cellular automata, fractional noise, and others can be used as tools for composition. ParameterObjects can also be embedded to other ParameterObjects to provide powerful, dynamic, and masked value generation. While parameter generation has its limits, Texture clones allow filtering and processing of textures.

For people looking for an alternative electronic music composition tool to Max/MSP, Pure Data, and other similar systems, it would be a good suggestion to try this system out. Flexatone h.f.p. AthenaCL requires Python 2.3 to 2.6 to run, is freeware, and has versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux.