I think this is a key thing to notice about Alda. It doesn't attempt to provide abstractions for things like keys, scales, or even measures and time signatures.

I think this is a key thing to notice about Alda. It doesn't attempt to provide abstractions for things like keys, scales, or even measures and time signatures. It's more like writing Markdown: you already know what you want to write; it just gives you a way to represent it in a compact way and turn it into something you can hear back without having to reason too much about what you've written. I want Alda to be as close as possible to a sheet of staff paper that you can write notes on. MML is a very similar language in this regard. The idea is that it's up to the composer to write down the exact notes he/she wants, exactly how he/she wants them. I realize this is disappointing if you're looking for something with more abstractions, but on the bright side, I think there are some great languages out there that do exactly that. If you haven't already, have a look at Music-Suite ( http://music-suite.github.io/docs/ref http://music-suite.github.io/docs/ref ) and Overtone ( http://overtone.github.io http://overtone.github.io ), along with the Leipzig library, which adds functional programming abstractions for use with Overtone ( https://github.com/ctford/leipzig https://github.com/ctford/leipzig )