The Music N language family, which describe both the implementation of the sound generation engines and the pitch and timing of the sound, goes back to the 1950s. The original member of this family was used to do the first digital sound synthesis (Max Matthews rendering "A Bicycle Built for Two"); the last and likely final member of the family, CSound, dates to the 80s but is still maintained and occasionally improved as an open source project.

The Music N family and other ideas inspired all kinds of much better text languages for music encoding, including examples like Chuck and the very large set of "live coding" languages that is constantly expanding.