Q-Midi: A MidiShare Interface for the Q Programming Language

This paper is about Q-Midi, an interface for developing MIDI applications in the Q programming language. Q is a modern functional language based on term rewriting; this means that a Q program is just a collection of equations which are used as rewriting rules to simplify expressions. Q-Midi represents MIDI events as symbolic data which makes it easy to formulate functional programs to manipulate and process MIDI sequences on a high level of abstraction. Realtime programming and the manipulation of MIDI files are also supported. Q-Midi is based on Grame’s MidiShare, a C library for portable MIDI programming. The interface works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems. Therefore Q-Midi provides an interesting tool for developing portable computer music applications in a high-level functional programming language.