THE HYPERCARD CENTER

HyperTalk Reference

Note: This is a work in progress and many formatting issues have been fixed. Read more about the project on the home page.

play

play stop

play sound

play sound notes

play sound tempo posInteger

play sound tempo posInteger notes

The play command plays a sound or a series of notes using a sound through the speaker of the Macintosh (or through the audio jack if it’s in use).

Play stop stops the current sound immediately; otherwise, the sound plays until it’s done and stops by itself.

Important: HyperCard continues to run handlers and perform other actions while a sound plays. Use the command wait until the sound is done to stop a handler until the sound is done playing.

The text string notes is an unlimited sequence of words in which each word represents one note. A note has the following NAOD format (Name, Accidental, Octave, and Duration):

Name        one of these letters:

            a, b, c, d, e, f, g, r

            (where r = rest)

Accidental  one of these characters:

            #, b

Octave      a positive integer

            (4 is middle C)

Duration    one of the letters:

            w, h, q, e, s, t, x

            where

            w = whole note

            h = half note

            q = quarter note

            e = eighth note

            s = 16th note

            t = 32nd note

            x = 64th note

You don't have to specify the accidental, octave, or duration of a note. Initially, the accidental defaults to none. The octave and duration default to the same values as the previous note, or to 4 (octave) and q (duration) for the first note.

Specify the note r to get a rest. For example: re --eighth note rest

A duration followed by a period (.) means a dotted note. A duration followed by the number 3 means one note of a triplet.

HyperCard can also play digitized sounds stored as 'snd ' resources. Use play with the name of the resource as the sound. The resource must appear in the current stack, a stack being used, or the Home stack.

HyperCard requires more RAM to play large digitized sounds—about 22K for every second the sound plays.

If HyperCard can't find the sound or load it into memory, the result gets Couldn't load sound. If the volume is set to 0, if an XCMD is using the sound channel, or if HyperCard is running in the background, the result gets Sound is off.

Examples

play "boing"

play "harpsichord"

play "Moo" -- if you have installed this sound into a stack

play "boing" "c e f f# g f e d c"

play "boing" tempo 150 "c e f f# g f e d c"

Placeholders

sound

An expression that evaluates to a text string and that is also the name of a digitized sound.

Boing, harpsichord, and flute are provided with HyperCard.

"boing"

"harpsichord"

"flute"

"my digitized sound"

notes

An expression that evaluates to a text string that is also a sequence of notes.

Each word of the string is a separate note. Each note has a name and an optional accidental, octave, and duration. For example:

"c#4q" -- single note

"c d e f g a b c5"

"f#5w c#3e a#4w"

"cq f. fe fw"

posInteger

An expression that evaluates to a positive integer.

For example:

3

67 mod 13

the number of bg fields

the number of backgrounds

the number of cards div 2

See also: background, bkgnd, button, card, chunk, field, menu, and menuItem

HyperTalk Reference

Version 0.8b4 (July 4, 2025)