New development on DosSIMS has essentially stopped. Those interested in a more full-featured similarity calculator should obtain WinSIMS--a Windows-based applicaiton.
I run DosSIMS at home on an 8088 with 640K of RAM. To use the Percentile function (described below), a 386 or higher processor is recommended, and a hard disk is absolutely necessary. Without the Percentile function, the program will run fine from a floppy disk. (I do not provide installation instructions for floppy-disk use.) A math coprocessor will speed things up somewhat, but is not required.
DosSIMS was an important tool in the completion of my dissertation, "Similarity of Interval-Class Content Between Pitch-Class Sets: The IcVSIM Relation and Its Application," (Indiana University, 1992) and the article, "Similarity of Interval-Class Content Between Pitch-Class Sets: The IcVSIM Relation" (Journal of Music Theory 34 [1990], 1-28).
I provide just minimal installation instructions here. If you need more detailed help, feel free to contact me via email, phone, or regular mail.
Before running DosSIMS, you can either change to the directory containing the program ("CD \DOSSIMS"), or add that directory to your path (usually specified in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file).
Type DosSIMS. The program will first look for four files: VECTORS.DAT, SQRTVEC.DAT, EMBTABLE.DAT, and COVTABLE.DAT. These files are included in the installation archive so they should be present. If they are not (if they have been misplaced or accidentally deleted), the program will ask if you want to create the tables contained in them and if you want to save them to disk. Unless you are operating under severe memory constraints, you should have the tables built and saved to disk for future use. If there is insufficient memory (RAM) to read the tables from disk or to create them (this might happen if you run the program from a DOS shell while running another program) the program will compute all the information it needs as it goes, which can slow things down considerably, especially on a low-end computer.
After the data table files are loaded, you will see a screen as shown below. At the top
of the screen are two boxes for entering pcset information. At the bottom is a large box
containing the names of 26 functions which are used to compare the two sets entered in the
Set Boxes.
Pitch-class sets can be entered in either of two ways: by specifying either the pitch classes of the set or the Forte number. These input fields are shown on-screen in boldface. The location of the cursor indicates the currently active input field. You will find it useful to use the numeric keypad. If NumLock is not already engaged, press the NumLock key before beginning. (Most keyboards have a light which is on when NumLock is engaged.)
Individual pitch classes and the two parts of the Forte number can be separated
by any non-numeric character. You must enter 10 and 11 for Bb and B; the program will not
recognize "A" or "B" as substitutes (sorry if that's your
preference!). I find it easiest to use the period (.) on the numeric keypad as a
separator. Pitch classes can be any non-negative number and are interpreted mod 12. For
example, you might enter "4.8.14.13.6.7" in the Pitch Class field. When you
press
Following is a description of the keys used to navigate between and edit the input fields, and calculate similarity values.
Pressing the "=" key (or "/", as a keypad shortcut) when two sets have been correctly entered, causes the program to calculate and display the similarity values for the two sets. In the first column is the actual value for the function. In the second column is a percentile ranking for that value under that function. For example, the sets with Forte numbers 6Z12 and 4-22 have an IcVSIM value of 0.764 and a percentile ranking of 83.8. This means that approximately 84% of all set pairs (involving sets of size 2 through 10) are more dissimilar than this pair. This helps given an idea of what a particular value means for a particular function.
Copyright 1998, Eric J. Isaacson