As you may have noticed by now, HighC is a graphical music instrument. It presents you with a graphical score of the piece or portion of piece you want to create or edit. HighC allows you to draw curves in the time and frequency domains. Each of those curves corresponds to a single sound, or musical note. Contrary to most intruments, a single note is not tied to a fixed pitch: it can travel through various pitches, up when you draw the curves towards the higher portions of the score, and down if you go down. The time axis is laid on the horizontal dimension: the left portion of the score represents the beginning of the piece, while the right portion of the score represents the end.
This overview is easy to understand, but some more details can be useful to improve your proficiency at using HighC. Those are covered in the 2 following sections:
A piece is the basic document you create and edit in HighC. it represents an audio track and contains: a set of sounds, a duration, waveforms, envelopes, patterns, scales & other properties, libraries, as well as playback/export audio rendering parameters.
A Sound is the basic constituent of a piece, that describes a time-situated auditory event. Sounds have a number of parameters: frequency curve, level, envelope, waveform, tags, spatial track. Sounds can be organized in sound groups: patterns and effects. Sounds can modulate each other by means of modulations.