The electronic medium has vastly increased the amount of material available to the contemporary composer. The various pieces of electronic equipment available today allow one to produce any conceivable sound; yet because of the complex nature of their output, these devices are generally difficult to control and the composer of electronic music may take several hours to prepare but a few minutes of his creation. EUTERPE was designed during the summer of 1966 by Marvin Minsky as a "real-time" music program" to be used at a teletype which was a direct link with a digital computer. The program is an interpreter and compiler, basically a translation device to convert symbolic input into internal machine language of a computer. The symbolic input consists of yup to six "voice-programs" which are strings of words.
