12 ms·

Alda – Text-Based Programming Language for Music Composition

490 points by p1esk 5y ago

kennywinker 5y ago
This looks useful and fun, but without programmatic ways of specifying notes (i.e. ‘$v1 = $v2 + 12’) it’s not much of a “programming language” and mostly just a “text based notation system”.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  It does have that? https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/variables.md https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/variables....
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    That seems to be for repeating things, but kennywinker is asking about shifting a note's pitch.
- Willamin 5y ago
  Looks like a previous version was mostly a Clojure DSL, but the latest major version no longer is. There are variables and other useful features we know from other programming languages that aren't mentioned on the landing page. Of course there are also varying definitions of what a programming language is. For instance, I consider CSS to be a programming language, but I know many people disagree with that position (and that's okay). I personally don't think that a "programming language" must be a general-purpose, turing-complete language. Alda seems to be a non-general purpose, turing-incomplete language. At this point though, we're maybe getting into semantics a bit. Syntax change: https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/alda-2-migration-guide.md#attribute-syntax-has-changed-in-some-cases https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/alda-2-mig...
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    >For instance, I consider CSS to be a programming language Out of curiosity, on what basis do consider CSS to be a programming language? And does it applies to versions prior to CSS3 too?
- SamBam 5y ago
  This is what I've wondered about -- with this and with the other few "music programming languages" on HN in the past year. They almost always seem to be simply "music notation", not music programming. At the end of the day, it's not that different from sheet music, just written slightly differently. If I wanted to actually program music based on this, could I? Could I write a loop that plays random notes on the pentatonic scale? Or that systematically plays through every scale, without writing out all the notes by hand?
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    It sounds like there’s a layer built on top of this to write clojure that interacts with alda, and you definitely could with that. There are also a bunch of other options. Orca (a visual sound programming language) and sonic pi would be where i would start for two very different approaches to the concept.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
For anyone curious what it actually sounds like when played by a musician, see https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=969 https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=969 and https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=1033 https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=1033
- rglover 5y ago
  Fun to watch, thanks for sharing.
smoldesu 5y ago
I actually quite like this. Current text notation in trackers is pretty painful to manipulate, and I've often found myself wanting for a plaintext language to use instead, specifically for writing niche or otherwise difficult portions programatically. The syntax in this language seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!
schot 5y ago
How does this compare to LilyPond? I'm surprised it isn't mentioned at all, since from a first glance the notation looks very similar. [0]: http://lilypond.org/ http://lilypond.org/
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  I don't see support for adding lyrics in Alda unless I'm missing it.
- tartoran 5y ago
  "LilyPond is a music engraving program", great for writing sheet music. This seems to be a music composition tool, eg you can use the repl to tweak your performance
- rekado 5y ago
  I actually used LilyPond for composition. It's a little less convenient because MIDI output is rather limited. But it gets the job done: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/music-production-on-guix-system/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/music-production-on-guix-s...
- nemetroid 5y ago
  I didn't see anything in the tutorial that LilyPond doesn't also do (and in a similar way).
hippari 5y ago
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k Scheme seems like a much more powerful language for music composition, with the ability to deal with fractions and making your own tuning system.
thebricksta 5y ago
Sorry to be a downer here, but can someone explain to me what the appeal of these projects are? In the past year or so I've seen a number of text-based music notation projects hit the front page of Hacker News and don't really understand the purpose they are trying to achieve. If I want to transport music notation between software programs, I have MIDI for that, which does a good job of capturing all elements of a performance (keys, timing, velocity, pedals, aftertouch, etc.) These types of notation formats almost always fail to achieve MIDIs precision across all the aspects of a performance. If I want to compose music, I need a format that makes it easy to visualize and manipulate notes in context of the other notes playing across all instruments. DAW piano rolls do a fantastic job of overlaying note information, and traditional combined scores do the same too. Again, text notation usually falls flat here - for example, if you had a large ensemble, and wanted to know which chord was being played on the 2nd beat of the 5th measure, how easily can do you do that? How do you determine if it's an open spacing or closed spacing? How do you determine the root without walking back through all the octave shifts?
- Kluny 5y ago
  For me, I think this is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a long time, and definitely the first musical programming language I've ever seen. I was a musician in high school and haven't picked up an instrument for a long time, but I still remember how sheet music works. As a drummer, I was never much good at reading notation or playing other instruments, so this would be a really accessible way for me to write music and see what it sounds like, as well as debugging it the way I would with code.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    How about just using C? https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o Maybe /s, maybe not…
  - jeofken 5y ago
    There is also the popular ABC music notation language, but it seems to be less comprehensive than OP
jononor 5y ago
Alda looks pretty neat. Manipulating it with a rewriting system (ala Lindenmayer) or a generative text model (hello GPT3) could be fun!
- nielsbot 5y ago
  I used to use GWBASIC to make music on the PC. I immediately thought the same thing.
bodge5000 5y ago
I'm yet to look deeply into Alda, is anyone aware of what it provides in the way of sound design (if anything at all)?
- Igelau 5y ago
  It looks like the answer is "no", with the addendum that waveform synthesis has been on the TODO list for a while: https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/list-of-instruments.md https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/list-of-in...
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    That's a bit of a shame, the search continues then Cheers for finding out for me regardless
incanus77 5y ago
This is neat. It’s basically a REPL for 80s BASIC-style Music Markup Language (MML), almost identical syntactically.
- montag 5y ago
  Indeed, MML is mentioned here: https://blog.djy.io/alda-a-manifesto-and-gentle-introduction/ https://blog.djy.io/alda-a-manifesto-and-gentle-introduction... This is another interactive MML project worth checking out: https://github.com/superctr/mmlgui https://github.com/superctr/mmlgui edit: unfortunately, we need to clarify...we're talking about Music Macro Language
- lioeters 5y ago
  Thanks for this reference, it led me down a curious tangent. It might not be the same thing - this one is XML-based, rather than "BASIC-style" - but I found an example of what Music Markup Language looks like, with Chopin's Trois Nocturne: https://steyn.pro/mml/examples/chopin.html https://steyn.pro/mml/examples/chopin.html For more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Markup_Language
  - montag 5y ago
    Oh...no...this MML is XML-based markup (read: not practical for use by humans), not the same as Music Macro Language.
    - lioeters 5y ago
      Hahah, I see, thank you for the correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Macro_Language#Modern_MML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Macro_Language#Modern_MM...
Mizza 5y ago
I ended up creating a lighter version of this for one my projects, https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi I think that something that Alda looks like it lacks right now is doing things around intervals rather than notes, as transpositions and key changes will be very tedious without embedded knowledge of intervals. My project is based around a Python library called Mingus, which I think gives you most of what you'd ever need to build a music programming project. https://bspaans.github.io/python-mingus/ https://bspaans.github.io/python-mingus/
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Without commenting on Alda specifically, people should understand that it's just one member of this list of highly overlapping (but also interestingly distinct) tools: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding "All things live coding : A curated list of live coding languages and tools"
qrv3w 5y ago
I love these text-based languages for music composition. Its something that is approaching a gap in music composition in real-life vs via computer. In real-life you can tell your bandmates to "just play a I V IV in C" and they get it. But we are still not quite at a place where we can tell a computer that exact phrase and get something useful. I love how close these text-based languages are getting though! I've actually made my own musical language too - called miti [1], which is just one of many others including textbeat [2], foxdot [3], sonic-pi [4], chuck [5], and melrose [6]. Each has their own goals and capabilities. - [1] https://github.com/schollz/miti https://github.com/schollz/miti - [2] https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat - [3] https://foxdot.org/ https://foxdot.org/ - [4] https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/ - [5] https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ - [6] https://github.com/emicklei/melrose https://github.com/emicklei/melrose
- dexterhaslem 5y ago
  what about trackers?
  - kleer001 5y ago
    What are you asking? They're a different beast.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    Trackers are a very different beast, however for my sake I've found them a good intermediary whilst your looking for the live coding language that suits you. I use Renoise (not free, but very cheap imo and very powerful), and have a sample pack called AWKW (I think, its something like that) which is just a load of single cycle waveforms, and I use that to build rudimentary subtractive synths.
    - yardshop 5y ago
      I think you must mean AKWF, Adventure Kid Wave Forms: https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-waveforms/ https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-wav... 4000+ single-cycle wave files of all sorts of sounds from various synths and instruments and such. Lots of great noises in there!
henearkr 5y ago
I have written a small wrapper in bash for lilypond, just to get the same result, a command-line REPL, that compiles and plays instantly. But in lilypond instead of Alda.
snambi 5y ago
Does it support karnatic music notations "Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni"? Usually written as S,R,G,M,P,D. Makes it easy for Karnatic/Tamil musicians.
Labo333 5y ago
This is music notation, not composition!
- Igelau 5y ago
  This is the car, not the driving.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
Love these little DSL experiments. The more the merrier
flenserboy 5y ago
I like it. Some eventual way to translate it to XeLaTeX or the like would also be nice.
xrd 5y ago
I'm glad to see more of these things. It's like a different take on Orca (https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca/ https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca/) or SonicPi (https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/). All of these are super fun. But, it feels like we are missing an amazing EDITOR to go with these LANGUAGES. For example, when "live coding" music I've not yet seen a great editor that could simulate what options there are for the next measure. I can do this with two turntables and a mixer. When I used to DJ, I can put a record on the other deck, listen to the beat, mix and match it, adjust the treble/bass, even the tempo and merge it in WITHOUT anyone hearing those experiments. I was always worried about timing it correctly, and when you shift to the other deck, sometimes is was great and sometimes is was terrible, which is what you get out of live music. I wish there were good editors that would permit me to enter in the chords and notes I want (like all these tools do), and at the same time, give me a window into insights like "adding this next chord progression would take it into a more jazzy realm" or "if you spread these notes over two measures and drop them an octave it will get really interesting." I suppose it is a lot to ask a computer to make those qualitative analyses of the music, but it seems like at least it could gather up some options. Computers are good at pattern matching. And, I've also yet to see these editors offering a way to collaborate, either in person, or over the internet. With a shared language and networks, we can do this. Timing is the biggest thing, but music has a consistent tempo (so your collaboration might not arrive in this measure, but we could guarantee it enters the composition on the next measure at the exact right time). I remember a FOSCON with _why (the lucky stiff). He came with a band to FreeGeek in Portland, and did this interactive music thing, where he put up a ruby program that all the attendees to the event could attach to with their own IRB session. And, then people could collaborate on the performance with him. It didn't go well. A veteran Perl programmer said "it was like watching a train wreck" (Perl people were pretty jealous of Ruby at that moment). It didn't go well, indeed, but it was so a fascinating idea to try and I wish there were more examples of this kind of thing. That would be such a great way to teach music.
- diskzero 5y ago
  This is a great insight. I have spent a lot of time creating a composition tool, but the assumption is that the user has some knowledge of composition. This is useful to a very small number of people. What is more useful is what you describe; an interactive bridge between the worlds of music notation, composition and algorithmic assistance. I would love to brainstorm some more if you have time. Drop me a note if you do!
jeofken 5y ago
Very cool! I’ve been an ABC user for years, but always missed being able to make full scores with multiple instruments or a whole orchestra. This is what I’ve been looking for
empressplay 5y ago
Programming Language = repeat 4 [repeat 4 [playnotes (word "L repabove 1 "A repcount "B repcount "C repcount + 1 "R repabove 1)]]
hikerclimber1 5y ago
Hopefully inflation in us reaches a billion percent
sadsatan 5y ago
absoLUTELy
sadsatan 5y ago
absoLUtEly this immediately screams HEY FUCK WITH ME PLEASE FOR HOURS ON END SO YOU DONT GET ANYTHING DONE
iamcreasy 5y ago
Does anyone know any good resource on learning music theory using tools like this?
vldmrs 5y ago
I was surprised not to find any demo of the Alda generated music on their website.
rawling 5y ago
> An interesting thing to note here is the >. This is Alda syntax for “go up to the next octave.” Whyyy? You are going up an octave. The notes/pitch/frequency are going up. The subsequent c is higher than the preceding b. Why the hell do you notate that "b > c", not "b < c"?
- rawling 5y ago
  Maybe because you physically move >that way> on a piano keyboard?
quaintdev 5y ago
Amazing. I wish they included mini player alongside each snippet. Another thing they could do is build a playground kinda thing like Go. Not sure if that's possible in this case.
warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
MacOS won't let me run alda by default, and I'm not sure they're wrong. There is an open source alda project, but these are binaries downloaded from alda.io. Who vouches for them?
kebman 5y ago
I have a feeling that learning a text-based tool like this, will give you greater control and flexibility over your work than NoteScore or Sibelius. Anyone tried both?

490 points by p1esk 5y ago

This looks useful and fun, but without programmatic ways of specifying notes (i.e. ‘$v1 = $v2 + 12’) it’s not much of a “programming language” and mostly just a “text based notation system”.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
It does have that? https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/variables.md https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/variables....
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  That seems to be for repeating things, but kennywinker is asking about shifting a note's pitch.
Willamin 5y ago
Looks like a previous version was mostly a Clojure DSL, but the latest major version no longer is. There are variables and other useful features we know from other programming languages that aren't mentioned on the landing page. Of course there are also varying definitions of what a programming language is. For instance, I consider CSS to be a programming language, but I know many people disagree with that position (and that's okay). I personally don't think that a "programming language" must be a general-purpose, turing-complete language. Alda seems to be a non-general purpose, turing-incomplete language. At this point though, we're maybe getting into semantics a bit. Syntax change: https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/alda-2-migration-guide.md#attribute-syntax-has-changed-in-some-cases https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/alda-2-mig...
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  >For instance, I consider CSS to be a programming language Out of curiosity, on what basis do consider CSS to be a programming language? And does it applies to versions prior to CSS3 too?
SamBam 5y ago
This is what I've wondered about -- with this and with the other few "music programming languages" on HN in the past year. They almost always seem to be simply "music notation", not music programming. At the end of the day, it's not that different from sheet music, just written slightly differently. If I wanted to actually program music based on this, could I? Could I write a loop that plays random notes on the pentatonic scale? Or that systematically plays through every scale, without writing out all the notes by hand?
- kennywinker 5y ago
  It sounds like there’s a layer built on top of this to write clojure that interacts with alda, and you definitely could with that. There are also a bunch of other options. Orca (a visual sound programming language) and sonic pi would be where i would start for two very different approaches to the concept.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

For anyone curious what it actually sounds like when played by a musician, see https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=969 https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=969 and https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=1033 https://youtu.be/7nbBSwopG-E?t=1033

rglover 5y ago
Fun to watch, thanks for sharing.

smoldesu 5y ago

I actually quite like this. Current text notation in trackers is pretty painful to manipulate, and I've often found myself wanting for a plaintext language to use instead, specifically for writing niche or otherwise difficult portions programatically. The syntax in this language seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!

schot 5y ago

How does this compare to LilyPond? I'm surprised it isn't mentioned at all, since from a first glance the notation looks very similar. [0]: http://lilypond.org/ http://lilypond.org/

ARandomerDude 5y ago
I don't see support for adding lyrics in Alda unless I'm missing it.
tartoran 5y ago
"LilyPond is a music engraving program", great for writing sheet music. This seems to be a music composition tool, eg you can use the repl to tweak your performance
rekado 5y ago
I actually used LilyPond for composition. It's a little less convenient because MIDI output is rather limited. But it gets the job done: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/music-production-on-guix-system/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/music-production-on-guix-s...
nemetroid 5y ago
I didn't see anything in the tutorial that LilyPond doesn't also do (and in a similar way).

hippari 5y ago

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k Scheme seems like a much more powerful language for music composition, with the ability to deal with fractions and making your own tuning system.

thebricksta 5y ago

Sorry to be a downer here, but can someone explain to me what the appeal of these projects are? In the past year or so I've seen a number of text-based music notation projects hit the front page of Hacker News and don't really understand the purpose they are trying to achieve. If I want to transport music notation between software programs, I have MIDI for that, which does a good job of capturing all elements of a performance (keys, timing, velocity, pedals, aftertouch, etc.) These types of notation formats almost always fail to achieve MIDIs precision across all the aspects of a performance. If I want to compose music, I need a format that makes it easy to visualize and manipulate notes in context of the other notes playing across all instruments. DAW piano rolls do a fantastic job of overlaying note information, and traditional combined scores do the same too. Again, text notation usually falls flat here - for example, if you had a large ensemble, and wanted to know which chord was being played on the 2nd beat of the 5th measure, how easily can do you do that? How do you determine if it's an open spacing or closed spacing? How do you determine the root without walking back through all the octave shifts?

Kluny 5y ago
For me, I think this is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a long time, and definitely the first musical programming language I've ever seen. I was a musician in high school and haven't picked up an instrument for a long time, but I still remember how sheet music works. As a drummer, I was never much good at reading notation or playing other instruments, so this would be a really accessible way for me to write music and see what it sounds like, as well as debugging it the way I would with code.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  How about just using C? https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o Maybe /s, maybe not…
- jeofken 5y ago
  There is also the popular ABC music notation language, but it seems to be less comprehensive than OP

jononor 5y ago

Alda looks pretty neat. Manipulating it with a rewriting system (ala Lindenmayer) or a generative text model (hello GPT3) could be fun!

nielsbot 5y ago
I used to use GWBASIC to make music on the PC. I immediately thought the same thing.

bodge5000 5y ago

I'm yet to look deeply into Alda, is anyone aware of what it provides in the way of sound design (if anything at all)?

Igelau 5y ago
It looks like the answer is "no", with the addendum that waveform synthesis has been on the TODO list for a while: https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/list-of-instruments.md https://github.com/alda-lang/alda/blob/master/doc/list-of-in...
- bodge5000 5y ago
  That's a bit of a shame, the search continues then Cheers for finding out for me regardless

incanus77 5y ago

This is neat. It’s basically a REPL for 80s BASIC-style Music Markup Language (MML), almost identical syntactically.

montag 5y ago
Indeed, MML is mentioned here: https://blog.djy.io/alda-a-manifesto-and-gentle-introduction/ https://blog.djy.io/alda-a-manifesto-and-gentle-introduction... This is another interactive MML project worth checking out: https://github.com/superctr/mmlgui https://github.com/superctr/mmlgui edit: unfortunately, we need to clarify...we're talking about Music Macro Language
lioeters 5y ago
Thanks for this reference, it led me down a curious tangent. It might not be the same thing - this one is XML-based, rather than "BASIC-style" - but I found an example of what Music Markup Language looks like, with Chopin's Trois Nocturne: https://steyn.pro/mml/examples/chopin.html https://steyn.pro/mml/examples/chopin.html For more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Markup_Language
- montag 5y ago
  Oh...no...this MML is XML-based markup (read: not practical for use by humans), not the same as Music Macro Language.
  - lioeters 5y ago
    Hahah, I see, thank you for the correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Macro_Language#Modern_MML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Macro_Language#Modern_MM...

Mizza 5y ago

I ended up creating a lighter version of this for one my projects, https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi I think that something that Alda looks like it lacks right now is doing things around intervals rather than notes, as transpositions and key changes will be very tedious without embedded knowledge of intervals. My project is based around a Python library called Mingus, which I think gives you most of what you'd ever need to build a music programming project. https://bspaans.github.io/python-mingus/ https://bspaans.github.io/python-mingus/

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Without commenting on Alda specifically, people should understand that it's just one member of this list of highly overlapping (but also interestingly distinct) tools: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding "All things live coding : A curated list of live coding languages and tools"

qrv3w 5y ago

I love these text-based languages for music composition. Its something that is approaching a gap in music composition in real-life vs via computer. In real-life you can tell your bandmates to "just play a I V IV in C" and they get it. But we are still not quite at a place where we can tell a computer that exact phrase and get something useful. I love how close these text-based languages are getting though! I've actually made my own musical language too - called miti [1], which is just one of many others including textbeat [2], foxdot [3], sonic-pi [4], chuck [5], and melrose [6]. Each has their own goals and capabilities. - [1] https://github.com/schollz/miti https://github.com/schollz/miti - [2] https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat - [3] https://foxdot.org/ https://foxdot.org/ - [4] https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/ - [5] https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ - [6] https://github.com/emicklei/melrose https://github.com/emicklei/melrose

dexterhaslem 5y ago
what about trackers?
- kleer001 5y ago
  What are you asking? They're a different beast.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Trackers are a very different beast, however for my sake I've found them a good intermediary whilst your looking for the live coding language that suits you. I use Renoise (not free, but very cheap imo and very powerful), and have a sample pack called AWKW (I think, its something like that) which is just a load of single cycle waveforms, and I use that to build rudimentary subtractive synths.
  - yardshop 5y ago
    I think you must mean AKWF, Adventure Kid Wave Forms: https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-waveforms/ https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-wav... 4000+ single-cycle wave files of all sorts of sounds from various synths and instruments and such. Lots of great noises in there!

henearkr 5y ago

I have written a small wrapper in bash for lilypond, just to get the same result, a command-line REPL, that compiles and plays instantly. But in lilypond instead of Alda.

snambi 5y ago

Does it support karnatic music notations "Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni"? Usually written as S,R,G,M,P,D. Makes it easy for Karnatic/Tamil musicians.

Labo333 5y ago

This is music notation, not composition!

Igelau 5y ago
This is the car, not the driving.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago

Love these little DSL experiments. The more the merrier

flenserboy 5y ago

I like it. Some eventual way to translate it to XeLaTeX or the like would also be nice.

xrd 5y ago

I'm glad to see more of these things. It's like a different take on Orca (https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca/ https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca/) or SonicPi (https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/). All of these are super fun. But, it feels like we are missing an amazing EDITOR to go with these LANGUAGES. For example, when "live coding" music I've not yet seen a great editor that could simulate what options there are for the next measure. I can do this with two turntables and a mixer. When I used to DJ, I can put a record on the other deck, listen to the beat, mix and match it, adjust the treble/bass, even the tempo and merge it in WITHOUT anyone hearing those experiments. I was always worried about timing it correctly, and when you shift to the other deck, sometimes is was great and sometimes is was terrible, which is what you get out of live music. I wish there were good editors that would permit me to enter in the chords and notes I want (like all these tools do), and at the same time, give me a window into insights like "adding this next chord progression would take it into a more jazzy realm" or "if you spread these notes over two measures and drop them an octave it will get really interesting." I suppose it is a lot to ask a computer to make those qualitative analyses of the music, but it seems like at least it could gather up some options. Computers are good at pattern matching. And, I've also yet to see these editors offering a way to collaborate, either in person, or over the internet. With a shared language and networks, we can do this. Timing is the biggest thing, but music has a consistent tempo (so your collaboration might not arrive in this measure, but we could guarantee it enters the composition on the next measure at the exact right time). I remember a FOSCON with _why (the lucky stiff). He came with a band to FreeGeek in Portland, and did this interactive music thing, where he put up a ruby program that all the attendees to the event could attach to with their own IRB session. And, then people could collaborate on the performance with him. It didn't go well. A veteran Perl programmer said "it was like watching a train wreck" (Perl people were pretty jealous of Ruby at that moment). It didn't go well, indeed, but it was so a fascinating idea to try and I wish there were more examples of this kind of thing. That would be such a great way to teach music.

diskzero 5y ago
This is a great insight. I have spent a lot of time creating a composition tool, but the assumption is that the user has some knowledge of composition. This is useful to a very small number of people. What is more useful is what you describe; an interactive bridge between the worlds of music notation, composition and algorithmic assistance. I would love to brainstorm some more if you have time. Drop me a note if you do!

jeofken 5y ago

Very cool! I’ve been an ABC user for years, but always missed being able to make full scores with multiple instruments or a whole orchestra. This is what I’ve been looking for

empressplay 5y ago

Programming Language = repeat 4 [repeat 4 [playnotes (word "L repabove 1 "A repcount "B repcount "C repcount + 1 "R repabove 1)]]

hikerclimber1 5y ago

Hopefully inflation in us reaches a billion percent

sadsatan 5y ago

absoLUTELy

sadsatan 5y ago

absoLUtEly this immediately screams HEY FUCK WITH ME PLEASE FOR HOURS ON END SO YOU DONT GET ANYTHING DONE

iamcreasy 5y ago

Does anyone know any good resource on learning music theory using tools like this?

vldmrs 5y ago

I was surprised not to find any demo of the Alda generated music on their website.

rawling 5y ago

> An interesting thing to note here is the >. This is Alda syntax for “go up to the next octave.” Whyyy? You are going up an octave. The notes/pitch/frequency are going up. The subsequent c is higher than the preceding b. Why the hell do you notate that "b > c", not "b < c"?

rawling 5y ago
Maybe because you physically move >that way> on a piano keyboard?

quaintdev 5y ago

Amazing. I wish they included mini player alongside each snippet. Another thing they could do is build a playground kinda thing like Go. Not sure if that's possible in this case.

warmfuzzykitten 5y ago

MacOS won't let me run alda by default, and I'm not sure they're wrong. There is an open source alda project, but these are binaries downloaded from alda.io. Who vouches for them?

kebman 5y ago

I have a feeling that learning a text-based tool like this, will give you greater control and flexibility over your work than NoteScore or Sibelius. Anyone tried both?