Welcome to the Home of Fripp

What's Fripp? Take a look:

What You Can Do with Fripp

• Enter "music" into cells of a spreadsheet. The columns of the spreadsheet contain the bars of your score, and the rows contain the staves. So each cell contains one bar's worth of music for one staff.
• Play the score from one or more MIDI instruments connected to your computer, if you have the (free) KeyKit application installed.
• Export the score to a file for high-quality rendering with the Mup music publication program.
• Organize compositions in workbooks, which can contain multiple scores. The picture above shows a workbook named "Lipstick", which contains three scores. The active score is called "Truly Almond".
• Enter formulas into the spreadsheet cells, to generate new music or transform other music in the score. Formulas can use built-in functions such as:
  • Reverse(): Return the reverse of a given musical phrase.
  • ReverseTime(): Return a transformation of a given musical phrase, with the pitches in the same order as the original, but their durations in reverse order.
  • ReversePitches(): Return a transformation of a given musical phrase, with the durations in the same order as the original, but their pitches in reverse order.
  • Transpose(): Return a transposition of a given musical phrase.
  • etc.
• Write your own functions in Python, to generate or transform musical phrases, or to control other aspects of the score, such as tempo, meter, key, or instrumentation.
• Write rich-formatted, hyperlinked notes about your scores, and store them in the workbooks.
• Automate Fripp with your own Python scripts.

More About Entering Music

In the picture, cell B2 is selected in the score spreadsheet. The cell shows the value rendered as musical notation, but near the top of the picture, you see a text representation of the underlying musical value in the formula bar.

As with Excel or other spreadsheet programs, the real value of the cell is something other than the text in the formula bar or the rendering in the cell. In this case, Fripp understands the value to be a list of six chords of various durations, each having a single note at a specific pitch.

These six chords are part of a larger structure mapped to the cells in the spreadsheet: the chords are assigned to voices (instruments), which are in staves, which are in the score. Fripp represents this structure as a hierarchy (of Pitch objects inside Chord objects inside Voice objects inside Staff objects, inside a Score object). The built-in functions that generate or transform the music (and the functions you can write yourself) operate on the objects in that hierarchy.

The text that represents the chords in B2 specifies chords' durations, and the note names and octaves of the pitches. Additional attributes (not illustrated here) can specify the volumes of the individual pitches and the amount of time by which each pitch is ahead of or behind the beat. When you enter music from the computer keyboard, Fripp offers numerous shortcuts to speed up the entry, and shows you the musical notation as you type. (In a future implementation, you'll be able to input the music from a MIDI instrument.)