Cycling '74 M Composition Software

M 2.7 is a Mac OS X version of a program first published by Intelligent Music in 1987. In the 1980s, M ran on four different computer platforms (Mac, Windows, Atari, and Amiga), and had many fans all over the world.

M was quite different from any other music software when it first appeared, but many musicians and composers were attracted to its powerful implementation of the idea of interactive composition, where you shape the music as you hear it unfold. M 2.7 features compatibility with OS X Core MIDI so you can use it to power the software synthesizers that sound great but are always need of better material.

Interactive Composition

Composing music with M is radically different from writing music on paper or recording into a tape recorder or MIDI sequencer.

Instead of merely playing back what you’ve already composed, M becomes a part of the actual process of composition. You enter your basic musical ideas and materials as melodies, chords, and rhythms, and then work with M to transform those ideas into finished compositions.

M’s powerful tools and musical controls let you work so quickly and interactively that the line between composing and performing becomes blurred. You’re composing and performing at the same time, and with a vast array of controls. You can control your music by clicking and dragging the mouse on the computer screen, by “conducting” in a Conducting Grid, by pressing keys on your computer keyboard, or by playing specific notes on your MIDI keyboard.

When working with M, you hear the musical results of everything you do while you’re doing it, so you can try new things and explore musical ideas without the computer getting in your way.

The M User Interface: Main Screen

M’s main screen is designed to be a musical control panel that lets you do many things simultaneously while giving you a visual overview of all of the program’s operations.

There are six windows in the main screen. Each window contains a particular grouping of controls, and the controls in all of the windows are interrelated as different parts of the same musical process. All of M’s main screen windows are always active so that you can use any control whenever you like.