There are many ways people share the responsibility of making music: they can collaborate in composing and performing music, a composer can leave performing to other musicians, a group of musicians can hire a conductor, a Performer can rely on an instrument maker to build a machine capable of turning musical gestures into sound. A less commonly used way to share musical responsibility is for a machine to be responsible for storing the notes of the score and playing back those notes in the proper order, leaving a human performer with only the responsibilities of the conductor — rhythm, tempo, dynamics, expression, interpretation.
With the Advent of computers and computer music, development of such an approach (which, when implemented with computers, is sometimes called the conductor program) has taken off, with several people experimenting with its possibilities. In this article, I describe some of this work, including my own implementation of the conductor program,
Tapper (which is available as freeware). My goal is for the article to provide an introduction to the idea of the conductor program and for
Tapper to provide an introduction to the experience of doing computer-mediated musical performance. Neither is intended to be comprehensive, but both are works in Progress, and I'm open to suggestions for simplifications, corrections and additions.
