[bensonalec]

Basically it's for creating music programmatically, conceptually it's solid although it does lack some major features (you have to convert frequencies to notes, and as far as I'm aware there's no inherent option to use the note itself).

[kroger]

You can use different ways to enter pitch [0]. A common way is to use the "octave.pitch" format, such as 08.04, where 08 is the central octave (if I remember correctly) and 04 is the note E. It's common to use a score generator such as PythonScore [1, 2], and some people (myself included) like to use a regular programming language to generate the scores. I've used Common Lisp, Tcl, and Python in the past. Csound has a few frontends [3] that people may like. AFAIK, Csound can read notes from a MIDI keyboard as well.

[0] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/PitchTop.html

[1] http://jacobjoaquin.github.io/csd/pysco.html

[2] http://write.flossmanuals.net/csound/methods-of-writing-csou...

[3] https://csound.com/frontends.html

EDIT: remove some repetition

[AndrewUnmuted]

This is one of the reasons why many of us in this field have moved on to SuperCollider[0] since the late 90s.

[0] https://supercollider.github.io/