Quick note entry feature

Back in the late 1970s I interfaced my first computer (Processor Technology Sol-20, 32 kbytes RAM) to my 10 rank pipe organ. I also hooked up an organ keyboard to the parallel port through which I entered the scores I wanted the computer to play on the organ (remember that this was before MIDI). In effect I turned it into a player organ. Although I am an amateur organist, I wanted to hear my organ play the great works of Bach which were (and still are) beyond my skill level. What I needed was an input program that let me enter complex music a note or a chord at a time.

The input program I developed (using 8080 assembler) worked much like a primitive version of MuseScore in that I could enter single notes, or chords, through the organ keyboard by pressing the appropriate key(s) and thus build up the polyphonic layers one bar at a time. As with MuseScore, the note length was selected via the computer keyboard. But what really speeded up the process was a technique that removed the necessity of going back to the computer keyboard every time the note length change. Here is how it worked:

Select any basic note length (an eighth, say).

Play a note, a beep sounds to indicate that the (eighth) note has been entered. The key is released.
Up to this point, (except for the beep sound), this is in effect how MuseScore works.

If, however, the key is not released, about half a second after the first beep sounds, a second beep is sounded, and then a third and a fourth, etc., all half a second apart until the key is released.

If the key is released after the second beep, the note is entered as a quarter note.
If the key is released after the third beep, the note is entered as a dotted quarter note.
If the key is released after the fourth beep, the note is entered as a half note.
Etc.

Rests were entered the same way by holding the computer's space bar for the appropriate number of beeps.

When using this program, it immediately felt very natural and intuitive to hold a note that was twice as long for two beeps, three times as long for three beeps and so on. This is not to be confused with real-time entry since between notes you have all the time in the world to ponder your next move. My wife and I used it successfully to enter many a Bach Toccata and Fugue and even Soler's music for two organs.

The only change to the MuseScore interface would be a menu item that would turn this feature on and off and provide a way for the user to select the interval between beeps. It could work equally well for MIDI input, input through the computer's keyboard, or input via the mouse.

My programming skills go back to Fortran, Pascal and ObjectLOGO and are horribly out of date, so it would be a very steep learning curve for me to implement this. I would be interested as to the merits of pursuing this idea. John Coenraads