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SCOT: A Score Translator

Scot is a language for describing scores in a fashion that parallels traditional music notation. Scot is also the name of a program which translates scores written in this language into standard numeric score format so that the score can be performed by Csound. The result of this translation is placed in a file called score. A score file written in Scot (named file.sc, say) can be sent through the translator by the command
     scot  file.sc
The resulting numeric score can then be examined for errors, edited, or performed by typing
     csound  file.orc  score
Alternatively, the command
     csound  file.orc  -S file.sc
would combine both processes by informing Csound of the initial score format.

Internally, a Scot score has at least three parts: a section to define instrument names, a section to define functions, and one or more actual score sections. It is generally advisable to keep score sections short to facilitate finding errors. The overall layout of a Scot score has three main sections:

     orchestra { .... }
     functions { .... }
     score     { .... }
The last two sections may be repeated as many times as desired. The functions section is also optional. You are free to break up each of these divisions into as many lines as seem convenient, or to place a carriage return anywhere you are allowed to insert a space, including before and after the curly brackets. Furthermore, you may use as many spaces or tabs as you need to make the score easy to read. Scot imposes no formatting restrictions except that numbers, instrument names, and keywords (for example, orchestra) may not be broken with spaces. You may insert comments (such as measure numbers) anywhere in the score by preceding them with a semicolon. A semicolon causes Scot to ignore the rest of a line.

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Prepared from the MIT Media Lab Csound Manual, PJN, Nov 1994.