Hierarchical Music Specification Language

Forth tools for experimental music from the 1980’s. HMSL was originally released for Macintosh and Amiga.

HMSL (C) 1986 Phil Burk, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom

Port to Windows (C) 1996 Phil Burk and Robert Marsanyi

Port to Macintosh (C) 2015 Andrew C Smith

HMSL is released under the open source Apache License V2.

A description of HMSL and complete documentation can be found here:

http://www.softsynth.com/hmsl/

PHMSL is built on top of pForth, a ‘C’ based Forth.

http://www.softsynth.com/pforth/

Description of folders:

docs/ - Original docs converted to Open Office format

hmsl/ - original package
hmsl/fth - the guts of HMSL
hmsl/pieces - lots of examples and some pieces that were distributed with HMSL
hmsl/screens - interactive GUI pages that need conversion
hmsl/tools - tools written using HMSL, e.g. the score entry system

native/Win32 - port of HMSL to pForth for Windows by Robert Marsanyi and Phil Burk

• Clone pforth into the same directory into which you cloned hmsl.
• Rename the folder pforth-xcode.
• Open xcode project in hmsl/native/osx
• Compile the HMSL-OSX command-line program. Ensure that it finds all necessary files, including the pforth-xcode/csrc folder.
• Copy the built HMSL-OSX program to pforth-xcode/fth. You can generally find it in native/osx/Build/Products/Debug.
• Navigate to pforth-xcode/fth and run ./HMSL-OSX -i system.fth
• Copy the newly-created pforth.dic and HMSL-OSX to hmsl/hmsl
• In hmsl/hsml, run command ./HMSL-OSX fth/make_hmsl.fth
• Press n to avoid starting HMSL this first time (it won't work anyway)
• Run ./HMSL-OSX to start HMSL! (and this time press y)

• Open xcode project in hmsl/native/osx.
• Select target hmsl from the target selection menu.
• Select Product > Build from the menu bar.