Common Music is a programming language designed for music composition; developed by Heinrich Taube, it can be interfaced with a variety of other software for sound synthesis like Csound, SuperCollider, and many others. In March 2014, the version 3.9.0 has been released.
The software is available for the three most important operating systems. If you are Mac user, and you want to download the program, please click here. For Windows users this is the link, beyond the version you have, XP, Vista, 7, or 8. For Linux users, finally, the download link is here. In any case, for all of them, I should mention that the software is free.
In any case, if you need some suggestions regarding the installation, I recommend to take a look at the guide by clicking on this link.
Via the official website of the Common Music, that you find at this link, you can also see a full user manual in HTML format. Or you can consult the pdf version which I am attaching below:
Many useful to learn how to use the program, are some tutorials that you can read by following this link.
Do not forget that the developer of the Common Music, Heinrich Taube, has also published a book, an introduction to computer music, who deals with the musical programming through Lisp-based languages, which is Common Music. You can see the html version of the book by Taube going on this page, or browse the pdf version directly here:
In general, to know what resources are available for this language, that can be used with Csound, SuperCollider and the Midi protocol, I recommend to read this page contains several links to other information pages and web resources. Finally, if you go to deepen the historical aspect of this software will remember instead of reading the voice Common Music in the Topics section of musicainformatica.
Other resources: a long and detailed free online book about music composition with Common Music and Common LISP, by Mary Simoni.
Introduction to Common Music by Heinrich Taube, a revisited online version of a paper published on Computer Music Journal.
This resource is a collection of Common Music examples.
Have any of you ever used this software to make music? It would be interesting to hear some personal experience!