As I used SongPainter, I was reminded of synesthesia, a psychological phenomenon involving a perceptual crossover, in which stimulation of one sense produces experiences in another. The most common example of synesthesia is the phenomenon of “color hearing,” in which particular musical notes consistently evoke the experience of particular colors. In one study, a subject reported the sensation of red on hearing the note C, violet on hearing D, pink on hearing F, and blue on hearing G, with identical results when the experiment was repeated seven years later.
One wonders if the programmers at Starcor, the company that created SongPainter, were thinking in terms of synesthesia when they developed this program. While it does not translate notes into colors, SongPainter uses visual images in the form of patterns and icons to represent tonal frequencies and waveforms. The note B is represented by a polka-dot pattern, the note A by checks, the note G by vertical stripes, and so on... In addition a note’s waveform, or timbre-the quality that gives each instrument its unique sound-is represented graphically by a musical instrument group, such as strings or woodwinds. Each group is broken down into individual instruments to represent a specific octave range for the waveform...
Composing by Clicking
SongPainter’ s main window is the Song window-the large window on the right in “Musical Windows”-and is the closest thing SongPainter has to a musical score. You use a paintbrush-shaped pointer to select each note’s characteristics, such as tonal range, timbre, and duration. Then you click a cell in the Song window, which deposits a pattern and an icon into that cell. You select tonal characteristics by clicking the appropriate boxes in the lefthand windows, timbre and tonal range by clicking a musical instrument icon, and pitch by clicking one of the note boxes. Likewise, you can select a note’s duration and loudness by clicking the relevant boxes in the middle left window.
If all this sounds cumbersome, that’s because it is. By the time you place a note in the Song window, you have clicked as many as five boxes, counting the More Instruments box, time enough for your muse to develop a headache and leave. And that’s just the beginning of your problems.
When you finally get around to placing a note in the Song window, it bears no resemblance to standard musical notation; a printout of your composition would be about as useful as a novel written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
SongPainter has other limitations as well. When you play back a musical selection, for example, every feature except the stop button is disabled. That means you can’t pull down any menus, scroll through the Song window, or even turn the repeat function on or off. And the stop button doesn’t just stop the music; it also rewinds the selection, so that when you restart, the music starts again from the beginning.
Thus SongPainter doesn’t let you stop the music and restart it where you left off, a useful feature in any musical playback device, be it tape deck, turntable, or computer.
A Positive Note
Nevertheless, SongPainter has a number of redeeming features. One of those is its collection of ready-made chords, which you can enter into the Song window instead of single tones. The chords are all there: the major and minor chords, the diminished and augmented chords, and all the seventh chords. In addition SongPainter has 12 built-in scales for playback-a useful educational device-or for entry into the Song window. Finally, the program’s InstantHelp feature can be useful when you are trying to find your way through the maze of instruments, tonal ranges, and windows. When you select Help On from the Help menu, the paintbrush pointer changes into a question mark, and a magic wand of information. Clicking on any of SongPainter s windows, menus, or menu items with the question mark produces a screenful of information about the queried item, an effective way of finding out about the software without reading the manual...
SongPainter's sound quality is as good as that of any other Macintosh music processor, and its range of features is adequate for most applications; for example, you can create your own waveforms and modify each note’s rate of onset and offset However, its user interface could have been designed to provide greater convenience. As it stands, the program is cumbersome. And if SongPainter were a true song painter, the Song window would scroll in sync with the music, and the individual notes would flash or highlight as they played, making it possible to “see” the music as you hear it.
Lavroff, Nicholas. (September 1985). SongPainter. Macworld. (pgs. 109-110).
SongPainter
Starcor
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
37 / 
2020-09-13 / 
61f2ce7ca6190faa9a2324b07662c0d5e5dc6248 / 
/ 
songpainter_dsk.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
