Xenakis "Mycenae Alpha" (1978) for UPIC

The UPIC system was conceived by Iannis Xenakis in the early 1950s; the first version of UPIC was built by Xenakis' research center, the CEMAMu, in the late 1970s, and the system continues to be developed to this day. Instead of a keyboard to perform the music, the UPIC's performance device is a mouse and/or a digital drawing board. These are used to trace the composer's graphic score into the UPIC computer program, which interprets the drawings as real time instructions for sound synthesis - the composition/performance of a graphic musical score and real-time sound synthesis are unified by the UPIC's approach.