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I’ve tried several live audio programming languages (though not to any great extent), and have found Extempore to be easily the best. It’s the only language I’v

by bradrn 5y ago

I’ve tried several live audio programming languages (though not to any great extent), and have found Extempore to be easily the best. It’s the only language I’ve found which lets me control both the low-level details of synthesis and the high-level details of musical structure, and — more importantly — edit them both live. The low-level language is C-like and statically typed with all the advantages that brings, and as a Haskeller I find it intuitive to structure the high-level details around recursion (in Scheme in this case). My only real frustration with it is the lack of documentation, though the source seems pretty readable. (That, and the fact I haven’t found anything to use it for yet!)

WORLD_ENDS_SOON 5y ago
Have you tried out the ChucK language? I haven't tried Extempore yet, but it looks like the way they handle timing could be similar. ChucK has a very elegant system for synchronizing synthesizers and sequencers where you can write code in a simple imperative style (within a sequencer you can "wait" until the next note needs to be played). The language runtime keeps all of the coroutines running in sync with a global clock. I don't know of other languages that use this style of timing, so I'd be very curious to hear how they compare.