structuring highc pieces

One of the key specificities of HighC over a few of its counterparts, such as HyperUpic, Coagula or Metasynth, is that it is a symbolic system rather than an analog synthesis system. In HighC (as in UPIC), a piece is made of sounds, and each sound is an individual object with its own properties, all numerically described. The piece is not an organic bitmap from which the acoustic phenomena emerge through a unique transformation. Simply said, HighC is to HyperUpic what MS PowerPoint is to Adobe Photoshop, or what Meccano is to Plasticine.

This has one drawback, namely that the representation of the auditory experience is not completely truthful ; it leaves room for interpretation. For instance, a sound with a noise waveform will be heard exactly the same whatever the pitch at which you place it.

However, there are very good reasons why I believe HighC should let you manipulate sounds as symbols: because it lets you introduce the power of language (or assembly of symbols organized by rules) into your music creation activity. By "power of language", I mean that HighC makes it possible to create and manipulate higher level abstractions made of low level sound components, and combine them with each other transparently.

It turns out, it is the essence of music composition to create such abstractions from raw acoustic events and combine them according to one's whim into more complex structures. Whether or not music is a language is a debate I won't enter into, but in any case, HighC lets you create a language to manipulate sound, rather than propose you a single method for chiseling into a glob of sound.

To enable this musical-language-building approach into HighC, 4 tools are provided to help you give structure to your creation and build upon raw sound material to higher abstraction levels:

Patterns: Patterns are group of sounds that you have organized in a certain way, and that you may want to reuse (with variations) throughout a piece or a bigger composition. Patterns can correspond to a few bars of rhythm, a chord or simple chord sequence, or a even a single but richly modulated sound that you want to manipulate as a whole instead of handling its separate parts one by one.
Tags: Tags are inspired by the now popular tagging systems one can find on the internet in blogs and social bookmarking sites. Tags lets you assign (and reassign) a common property to a set of sounds, and then manipulate this set (through selection) as a collection. Tags encompass the traditional notions of voices and parts in a composition, and much more. Tags also encompass the notion of track you find in many audio mixers and sequencers.
Libraries: Often, you will want to reuse material, such as waveforms, envelopes, patterns or scales from a piece to another, and store them for later reuse, independently of a given composition. You may also want to work separately on several differing versions of a single piece. Libraries enable you to store all your components in a separate place, that can be referenced from various other pieces.
Scales (time and pitch): Scales do not structure the objects (sounds or groups) you are manipulating, but rather the space in which you are manipulating them. Scales in HighC correspond to musical scales (for pitch) and tempo specifications (time scales). They help you assemble and manipulate your sounds along precise intervals at given tempi.