5 ms·

The Haskell School of Music – From Signals to Symphonies

119 points by infodroid 11y ago

CountHackulus 11y ago
Neat, a way to both learn Haskell and learn some basics of music theory. Fun stuff.
- javajosh 11y ago
  I'd tend to be skeptical that you can learn two difficult things at once. I can see this being useful if you know music theory and want to learn haskell; or, if you know haskell, you want to learn music theory!
  - prezjordan 11y ago
    What if you're mediocre at both!
dvdcxn 11y ago
This seems amazing. It combines three things I've been meaning to learn for ages - Haskell, Music theory and Digital Music. THANK YOU so much for showing me this, OP.
- zerr 11y ago
  To be honest, you should first know that three things before starting reading this book.
  - Cederfjard 11y ago
    >The book also teaches functional programming in Haskell from scratch. It is suitable for use in the classroom to teach functional programming, computer music principles, or both. Do you disagree with this statement? I haven't read the book, but this the opinion of the author, after all.
    - zerr 11y ago
      Sorry, I should've said "those two things". I started reading this book but I was put off by music theory. If one already knows music theory, I guess it should be fine to learn Haskell with it, but not the other-way.
vitno 11y ago
Written by Paul Hudak, who recently passed away.
- infodroid 11y ago
  Yes and the book was never "officially" published. It's not clear whether Hudak would have considered it complete. There are two new chapters compared against an earlier announcement: http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of-music/ http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of-music/ I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you Paul.
tunesmith 11y ago
Wow - as someone with a music degree that is currently transitioning from imperative programming to functional programming in Scala, this looks really fun.
- noelwelsh 11y ago
  As you're learning Scala you might enjoy this music composition library: https://github.com/underscoreio/compose https://github.com/underscoreio/compose Blog post about it: http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/03/05/compositional-music-composition.html http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/03/05/compositional-mus... It's based on the ideas in the Haskell library, but much simpler.
Jiig 11y ago
Used the euterpea library in a class about computer music. Super fun, great way to learn haskell.
fberg 11y ago
While this book is an interesting and fairly comprehensive book on functional programming and music theory, I have the impression that the idea of algorithmic composition as expressed in this book is out of fashion now. Algorithmic composition was big in contemporary, "serious" music in the last part of the 20th century, but my contemporary composer friends seem to have left their Markov chains and Lisp algorithms and are now more into interactive stuff, with Processing and Arduino being a couple of the technologies du jour. It's not a clear-cut distinction, you can of course use Haskell and FP for interactive music creation and there will be various degrees of algorithmic composing in an interactive, computer based performance. But the possibilities of pure, computer generated music have largely been explored, decomposed down to sample-level granularity and recomposed using all thinkable sound generating algorithms. The cultural impact has been somewhere between weak and zero. People still prefer tonal music composed by humans. I believe algorithmic composition has suffered the same fate as symbolic natural language processing. They are both interesting from an academic point of view, but have failed to produce the wanted end results. Computers have not given us new musical dimensions that anyone outside an academic, postmodernist following care to listen to. The hope (or threat, depending of how you view it) may lie in statistical approaches. Thorough statistical analyses of existing compositions and recomposition based on that, parallelling what Google translate does with natural language processing. As far as I know, there are companies and researchers working on that, so don't throw away those Markov chains yet.
- lispm 11y ago
  Even though there is still active development work on music composition applications in Lisp. Recently a new commercial application has been published: OpusModus http://opusmodus.com http://opusmodus.com . It's written in Clozure Common Lisp and a port to Windows is planned. Symbolic Composer (LispWorks) still has new releases from time to time. PWGL (LispWorks) is still developed. OpenMusic now is based on LispWorks and has a Linux port.
  - fberg 11y ago
    And there's Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/), based on Clojure and SuperCollider.
Vektorweg 11y ago
This has been posted often. http://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query="The%20Haskell%20School%20of%20Music" http://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query="The%20Haskell%20...
aooeeu 11y ago
I was hoping to see at least some discussion of temperaments [1], like Scala [2], but this appears to only support 12-tone equal temperament? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament [2] http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

119 points by infodroid 11y ago

CountHackulus 11y ago

Neat, a way to both learn Haskell and learn some basics of music theory. Fun stuff.

javajosh 11y ago
I'd tend to be skeptical that you can learn two difficult things at once. I can see this being useful if you know music theory and want to learn haskell; or, if you know haskell, you want to learn music theory!
- prezjordan 11y ago
  What if you're mediocre at both!

dvdcxn 11y ago

This seems amazing. It combines three things I've been meaning to learn for ages - Haskell, Music theory and Digital Music. THANK YOU so much for showing me this, OP.

zerr 11y ago
To be honest, you should first know that three things before starting reading this book.
- Cederfjard 11y ago
  >The book also teaches functional programming in Haskell from scratch. It is suitable for use in the classroom to teach functional programming, computer music principles, or both. Do you disagree with this statement? I haven't read the book, but this the opinion of the author, after all.
  - zerr 11y ago
    Sorry, I should've said "those two things". I started reading this book but I was put off by music theory. If one already knows music theory, I guess it should be fine to learn Haskell with it, but not the other-way.

vitno 11y ago

Written by Paul Hudak, who recently passed away.

infodroid 11y ago
Yes and the book was never "officially" published. It's not clear whether Hudak would have considered it complete. There are two new chapters compared against an earlier announcement: http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of-music/ http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/haskell-school-of-music/ I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you Paul.

tunesmith 11y ago

Wow - as someone with a music degree that is currently transitioning from imperative programming to functional programming in Scala, this looks really fun.

noelwelsh 11y ago
As you're learning Scala you might enjoy this music composition library: https://github.com/underscoreio/compose https://github.com/underscoreio/compose Blog post about it: http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/03/05/compositional-music-composition.html http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/03/05/compositional-mus... It's based on the ideas in the Haskell library, but much simpler.

Jiig 11y ago

Used the euterpea library in a class about computer music. Super fun, great way to learn haskell.

fberg 11y ago

While this book is an interesting and fairly comprehensive book on functional programming and music theory, I have the impression that the idea of algorithmic composition as expressed in this book is out of fashion now. Algorithmic composition was big in contemporary, "serious" music in the last part of the 20th century, but my contemporary composer friends seem to have left their Markov chains and Lisp algorithms and are now more into interactive stuff, with Processing and Arduino being a couple of the technologies du jour. It's not a clear-cut distinction, you can of course use Haskell and FP for interactive music creation and there will be various degrees of algorithmic composing in an interactive, computer based performance. But the possibilities of pure, computer generated music have largely been explored, decomposed down to sample-level granularity and recomposed using all thinkable sound generating algorithms. The cultural impact has been somewhere between weak and zero. People still prefer tonal music composed by humans. I believe algorithmic composition has suffered the same fate as symbolic natural language processing. They are both interesting from an academic point of view, but have failed to produce the wanted end results. Computers have not given us new musical dimensions that anyone outside an academic, postmodernist following care to listen to. The hope (or threat, depending of how you view it) may lie in statistical approaches. Thorough statistical analyses of existing compositions and recomposition based on that, parallelling what Google translate does with natural language processing. As far as I know, there are companies and researchers working on that, so don't throw away those Markov chains yet.

lispm 11y ago
Even though there is still active development work on music composition applications in Lisp. Recently a new commercial application has been published: OpusModus http://opusmodus.com http://opusmodus.com . It's written in Clozure Common Lisp and a port to Windows is planned. Symbolic Composer (LispWorks) still has new releases from time to time. PWGL (LispWorks) is still developed. OpenMusic now is based on LispWorks and has a Linux port.
- fberg 11y ago
  And there's Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/), based on Clojure and SuperCollider.

Vektorweg 11y ago

This has been posted often. http://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query="The%20Haskell%20School%20of%20Music" http://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query="The%20Haskell%20...

aooeeu 11y ago

I was hoping to see at least some discussion of temperaments [1], like Scala [2], but this appears to only support 12-tone equal temperament? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament [2] http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/