Music on Symbolics

Someone interested in Symbolics asked for insights beyond my 
experience or recollection, he wrote:

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I'm a musician who writes music with a MIDI-based music studio.  Over 
the past couple years I have entertained the idea of installing a 
Symbolics workstation in my studio and writing 
composition/performance software to sequence and manipulate my "live" 
playing.  
But having never used Genera, or a Lisp machine for that matter, I 
have no idea if any of the Symbolics workstations could achieve the 
timing consistency needed to record and playback musical events.

What would your assessment be for using Genera for realtime musical 
applications?  What kind of machine do you think I'd need to obtain 
usable results?
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and
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But what has made me consider a Lisp machine on several occasions is 
that I'm a musician with an ambition for developing new tools I can 
use in my music-making.  I'm not a full-time software artisan, nor do 
I think that is where my talents lie.  However, I think I have a 
better idea of what I want than anyone else, so I should write what I 
want to use.  If I had a kind of closed playground for helping me 
efficiently model and experiment with my ideas, an environment where 
I'm not getting bogged down by platform idiosyncrasies or compiler 
issues, then I'd stand a chance of making good use of the working 
time I'm not devoting to composing and performing.

My experiences toying with a native chip-based Forth a few years back 
left a lasting impression on me.  I really enjoyed the superb level 
of integration between hardware and software in an extensible 
language environment natural for rapid prototyping.  If I could have 
that, but also have a more fully featured toolset for building 
powerful object-oriented software and decent user interfaces, I'd 
have it made.  Lisp, and Lisp machines in particular, seemed like the 
best answer to this need.  Incidentally, Lisp(/Scheme) is becoming a 
kind of lingua franca among experimental musicians who use computers, 
so I'll be committing to using it for the foreseeable future.

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Can any give any insights into this?
Can a Symbolics system achieve the timing consistency needed to 
record and playback musical events?

Peter