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dna2abc

Music synthesis tool for DNA sequences

Phil Mercurio
mercurio@acm.org

Begun 2000-07-09

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dna2abc reads DNA sequence files and outputs ABC music files,
according to rules you specify.  The program provides commands
for manipulating two types of objects: scanners, which read
DNA sequences, and voices, which output ABC music.  

The core of the program is the rules table editor.  Each 
scanner has a table of rules, each rule consists of a Tcl
regular expression and a Tcl script.  As the scanner traverses
its input DNA sequence, each time there's a match with one of 
the regular expressions the corresponding Tcl script is 
executed.  Usually the script would manipulate one or more of 
the voices, but there are no restrictions regarding what the 
script can do.  It can even change the scanner's parameters!

The format for the input DNA files is ASCII text, with lines
of arbitrary length (line breaks are ignored).  Lines beginning
with > are taken to be comments, the entire line is discarded.

The output format is ABC's ASCII music format, one track per
file.  The rest of this documentation assumes that the reader
is familiar with ABC.  Documentation on the ABC format can be
found under the dna2abc installation directory in the abcDocs 
subdirectory.  Under Windows and Linux, a command-line program 
to convert ABC to MIDI is included, and dna2abc has an option 
to invoke it to generate a MIDI file for each ABC file 
automatically.

Users should read the Commands help file before attempting to
use the program.  Basic knowledge of Tcl and regular expressions
is also assumed.
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