New Functions

- Advanded Tonality Processing
- Custom Tonality Symbols
- Modulations & Analysis
- Positional Chords
- Enrichment Rules
- Scale/Chord Visualization
- Serialized Recursive Sections
- Number Theory Additions
- Cosmix Toolbox Additions
- Re-Engineered System and Tonality Menus
- Documentation of Missing System Functions added
- Extended Essential Lisp Functions added
- Custom Interface Fonts & Sizes

User Interface Enhancements

- Windows Go Menu (shows related functions and Go jump points)
- Ctrl+Mouse Click (lists searches of selected string)
- Custom System Index Menus (custom items can be added, based on system-wide searches)
- Output Folder on System Index (shows MIDI files on the Output Folder for quick double-click playback)
- Dynamic Menu Updating (when saving new files they shows immediately on the Menus)
- Intuitive Save & Open path (follows the window path of the topmost window)
- Full Desktop Restoration (saves now System Index Menu position, Lookup Search Windows and Ind Search Windows, as well as other interface items, and restores them to the situation at the last quit)
- Web Page loading fixed (no LW license required, now it works always when the computer is connected to the internet)
- Wider Cursor (cursor is now easier to spot)

Themes and Default Settings

- Set MIDI Playback Selection, Font Size Adjustement, Interface Theme Selection and Window Stacking Adjustements on the Defs/Default Settings Menu
- Add custom fonts, themes, and MIDI Apps to the Menus (make a new file at Environment/Setup/Default Parameters/ folder hierarchy)
- Select Theme and Font Size that matches the monitor size, viewing distance and lightning conditions of your Studio)
- Set up easily Doc window (Editor, System Index and Listener) default positions and window sizes dragging them to the required outlook

Syntax Coloring

Syntax Coloring highlights SCOM functions, and make it easier to spot what is your data and what are the functions. Function parameters are also highlighted on the documents - so you can now clearly see when the parameter names are referenced in the docs.

This also helps seeing items that have further documentation available by double-clicking.

Default theme shows all functions in the same color. Additionally, the theme can be set to Lisp Programming mode, which shows scores as they would appear in LispWorks, or coloring can be completely switched off, yielding black-and-white display for purist coders.

How To Choose a Theme?

Additional themes display function categories with impressionistic color palettea. They provide aesthetic pleasure for viewing the scores (as well as functional, since the color shows the category that each function belong to).

Choose an alternate All Night Hacking theme, for example, that time-ports you back in time of retro teletype-terminal (with Jamaican undertone).

Or view your scores in Sakura Black with subtle Asian pastels.

A special Bauhaus Theme designed by Mrac sets up category colors visible on a white background, where similar categories are shown in equal colors - this applies the pure Tradition of European Functionalism, indeed.

Or apply warm sunset colors as an inspirational source of a golden quality ... or make your own theme: 

Default Settings folder is located at Environment/Setup/ - Make a copy of the file you want to enhance and edit it - it will then appear on the Defs/Default Settings/ Menu to choose from (and let us know about your new theme inventions!). Hints: Use black background to make subtle colors visible in low-light working environments to minimize eye-stress, and use subtle backgrounds and high contrast colors to allow viewing in day-light situations.

Themes provide both aesthetic, inspirational and practical values:

- At a day light small fonts and whitish background looks clear, but at a night the contrast will hurt eyes, and a black background may suit better.

- When working with a laptop it often happens, that the screen is viewed at a close distance in the studio, but at a night while sitting in a comfortable easy-chair, the screen may be a bit further away - or maybe you are working without spectacles, or having another class of wine to get into the mood.

- Bigger fonts and theme adjustements are also needed when working with larger monitors - or with 32-55 inch TV:s used as computer displays viewed at a distance.

- Colors also enhance your mood - sometimes you may feel a bit jammed while coding the score on white - kick on some colors to change the mood - a simple and effective way in the style of ENO's random cards, that will put you in a new gear.

Streamlined Default Settings Menu

Let's take an overview on the SCOM interface. On the left side of the screen you'll notice several buttons on the Score Editor Window in the background. These buttons let you evaluate the score (these compile the score into a MIDI file). You can also make a quick search, and visualize data to experiment with interesting material before composition takes place (graphs are shown on black background windows).

On the right side you'll see two System Index Windows. These allow quick browsing of the User's Manual, Documentation, Compositions, Tonalities and Libraries and Functions. The menubar on the top provides fully categorized access to the system.

Notice the smaller Document Editor Window in the middle left - document windows show full function documentation with copy/paste examples, and you can also evaluate them right up in there, too.

In the left-up corner you'll see the QuickTime Player, which plays the MIDI file by default (you can set SCOM to launch Logic, Cubase or other sequencer & notational program, flexible Rondo MIDI Player, or even Reaktor audio synthesis application).

Note visualization is shown at the bottom left. Buried down at the bottom lurks the SCOM Output Window, which lists the results of the score compilation.

Symbolic Composer 6.2 includes new tonality functions, and adds up other functions, and previously undocumented functions - making it now all transparent. Menus and System Index are re-engineered, which makes it easier to handle documents and scores.

Tonality handling gets a big boost in the SCOM 6.2. New tonality functions include full set of functions that enable to add, delete, mix, modulate, generate, enrich and analyze tonality progressions. Tonality Symbols add an efficient way to orchestrate tonality progressions.

Tonality system includes now positional chords, which together with chromatic enrichment rules enable to  add intelligent dissonances to the progressions - that still preserve their original positional role in emotional and theoretical aspects. Also included is chord and scale visualization and audio preview.

Extended Tonality Generation

New Custom Tonality Symbols support is found in the Create/Activate menus. Tonality Symbols provides a new way to handle tonalities with symbols and their tonalitity associations - and activate the symbols (manual, or generated) with transponations to create full tonality zones for the composition.

And it's recursive, too, which enables to redefine the symbols with their earlier tonality bindings. Added flexibility comes from free tonality content, which can be either a manually defined notelist or a generated/processed tonality zone representation.

In the Generation menu you will find functions that let you generate tonality progressions, or create interpolations between tonalities, as well as tools that perform symbol pattern mapping into tonalities, or conversions that can take place between symbols and semitone patterns.

Positional chords are implemented according to the rules of Classic Music Theory - developed by the German, French and Italian composers in the 17th Century - which is also used extensively nowadays in popular music genres.

SCOM 6.2 not only restores the historical positional chord generation, but updates it with logical enrichments rules and n-note n-spread production in custom scales, that allow full chromatism - still following and extending the traditional way of thinking.

With these tools SCOM 6.2 transmutes the tradition into a new level of abstraction, which allows to apply all that psychology behind the positional sequences (I-IV-V and the other well-regarded sequences) in chromatic and custom tonalities.

Adnvanced Tonality Processing

Modulation is the change of a key (the tonality base of a diatonic scale), which traditionally has aimed at progressing into keys that resemble the original key - to make ear-pleasing and harmonic solutions.

Take the modulation into a new level with SCOM 6.2 - analyze any tonality progressions and quickly find the mostly similar or distant ones. As the tonalities in SCOM can be completely free-definable, the modulation mechanism opens up a new way to realize logical transitions within the tonality material.

Together with all the other tonality enhancements, SCOM 6.2 now becomes a full "Computronium", where tonalities are not static or simple changes of the zones, but computable entities integrated with the melodic and rhythmic components of the composition.

Enhance menu lets you add or deletes notes to the tonalities. Sorting and finding unique notes are also  useful tools when programming tonality progressions, as well as the other functions that enable to make tonality distortions.

Few supplementary functions were added, too, such as tonality mixer that preserves only unique notes in the mixture.

Integrated Wolfram Alpha web-snippet yields now visualization of the chords and scales in the notation grid and on the keyboard, so you can easily improvise with the material on a keyboard.

Web pages now also load without LispWorks License! Just ensure your computer is connected to the internet and you will be able to browse WIKI compositional and Common Lisp stuff within SCOM.

Streamlined System Menu

SCOM 6.2's System Menu provides access to composition orchestrations and arrangements. You will also find mathematical, symbolic and conversion functions here.

The Cresc, Cadar and Mrac Libraries have been programmed by contemporary composers, and provide structurized access to contemporary music power-tools. The other menus list all the other basic musical functions and primitive of the system.

SCOM 6.2 menu organization was re-engineered to make accessing elements easier. On below we'll show the new grammar serialization addition, that enables full recursive section structures to be realized.

A couple of other functions were added to SCOM 6.2. These number theoretic sequences came from a vast internet library dealing with integer sequences. These additions also show you how to tap into more integer series from this library.

Two small, but a useful functions to find inner and outer interpolations between two symbols were added to SCOM 6.2. They answer the question of a symbol program, which asks "what symbols should I change, modify or add next in this particular symbol context."

Lisp's union and different are ok for general purpose, but do not take account real-life situations, where set lengths do not match. SCOM 6.2 now adds these functions to find sameness and differences between patterns.

Proportional lengths adds sampler-like rhythmics processing to SCOM 6.2, which generate equivalent lengths in the style of sample-loops simultaneously played on the keyboard with rhythmic beats that arise from the sample frequency-shifting.

Realtime Cosmic Noise

SCOM's Algorithmic Noise Generators cover White, Pink, Brownian, Gaussian and 1/f Noise. These implement rich mathematical sources of random information useful in production of the elements of the score. SCOM 6.2's Cosmix Toolbox now adds realtime noice sources, which come literally "out of space". That is, the source of the information is transmitted to Earth from NASA Satellites.

According to new sciences the Sun itself interacts with the Earth's electromagnetic field, which causes disturbances with the Earth's inner core and triggers tensions in the crusts to discharge as earthquakes and volcano distruptions.

The Sun's effects in ionosphere directly modulates the weather patterns, too, creating cyclones, tornados, extreme rain, temperature changes, or even strange visual phenomenon in the sky, which may appear not just as auroras but spirals and Z-Pinch Plasma Discharge Patters - as documented in early stone-carvings by the pre-historic man.

While earth-changes cause a lot of stress to humans also the brain itself is sensitive to the strong electromagnetic fluctuations caused by the Sun. Together they increase the probability of major shifts in human mass behaviour, politics and economics to take place.



As we are now approaching Solar Maximum within few years, SCOM 6.2 integrates NASA Interface to the SCOM Core. This addition allows you to tap into Solar Wind (Solar Spot and Coronal Mass Eruption) data, and apply realtime Sun's Electron and Proton Flux as a source of cosmic noise in the compositions - the pulse that is affecting us all.

SCOM 6.2's Magnetic Portals let you tap into the "Space Beats" of the Solar System by using calculation of the speed of light and realtime planet positions in space. These magnetic portals act like gates of information flow between planets regularly, as discovered by the recent space research.