An auto-play apparatus has an edit function for thinning out various kinds of music tone control information indicating analog control amounts contained in auto-play data pre-stored in units of parts. A data sequence of music tone control information to be edited is received to detect if the target data and its preceding and succeeding data indicate one of an increment data sequence and decrement data sequence, and thins out the target data to reduce the data volume.

A musical performance data editing system having an edition designating unit for designating an edition position and edition contents, an edition range determining unit for determining an edition range in accordance with edition designation, and an editing unit for editing information regarding the edition contents in the determined edition range in accordance with the edition contents.

The present invention discloses a computer system adapted for composing sound. Sound is composed via a combination of blocks and modifiers, where a block is an abstraction of a collection of data that, when processed by appropriate algorithms and hardware, produces sound. Further, the current invention also comprises one or more modifiers, each of which, when applied to a block, alters the sound produced by that block.

A data base includes a plurality of music data set specifying a plurality of sample musical pieces. Each sample musical piece is expressed and specified by either or both of melody characteristics or a melody itself with respect to the respective phrases on a phrase-by-phrase basis in a musical piece. The user inputs a melody fragment or melody characteristics for a particular phrase of a musical piece to be composed. The apparatus selects from the data base a musical piece including a phrase whose melody itself or melody characteristics is equal or similar to the melody fragment or melody characteristics as inputted by the user, and generates a melody fragment for the designated phrase to be included in a composed musical piece by utilizing the inputted melody fragment as it is or by generating a melody fragment based the melody or melody characteristics of the same phrase in the selected musical piece in the data base. Melody sections covering the remaining phrases are generated based on the melody data or the melody characteristics data of the remaining phrases included in the selected musical piece. The generated or utilized melody fragment for the particular phrase plus the generated melody sections for the remaining phrases in combination constitute an automatically composed musical piece product.

In a music apparatus 50 of this invention, digital data received at a digital input terminal 20 are stored in a primary memory area 22a on a hard disk drive 22. Subsequently, a music data converter 23 performs a predetermined conversion of the digital data stored in the primary memory area 22a to obtain digital data having a different form, and the altered data are thereafter stored in a secondary memory area 22a on the hard disk drive 22.