alda VS Tidal

Interesting approach. There has been much activity in recent years in live coding with a lot of interesting solutions.

> most music coding software out there is more focused on experimentation rather than conventional songwriting

Did you have a look at e.g. https://github.com/alda-lang/alda or https://abcnotation.com/? Or e.g. https://github.com/emicklei/melrose is a similar approach as yours. There is also an algorithcmic composition language called SAL which is used in Common Music (https://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/) and Niquist (https://sourceforge.net/projects/nyquist/).

As a semi-serious answer Alda: https://alda.io/

Look into Alda music programming language - it's possible to write classical music with it. It's more like MIDI or classical notation - you don't care about sound but you specify notes.

https://alda.io/

check out https://alda.io/ - it takes some form of music notation and plays it using general MIDI synth

Hi! The way it works is that you save alda files to a text file, then you play them using the alda player using the command line. I haven't looked into Alda 2 yet, but you can take a look at the documentation here

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-mig...

So you’re wondering what would making music with code look like? The tools I’m familiar with are TidalCycles, Sonic Pi, and SuperCollider. I’m having a hard time describing what it’s like to make music with tools like these so here’s a video of a performance. One person is live coding the music and the other is live coding the visuals. I think it’s super cool how the music is improvised and built over time by layering commands. Some keywords you could search to see more examples would be Algorave and Livecoding.

https://tidalcycles.org/ is another great example, parsing patterns of text and printing live music.

For sound live coding/algorave sonic pi and tidal cycles are great, both based on supercollider.

I don't know the alternatives but I'm a big fan of https://tidalcycles.org/. People really do crazy things, check out the videos on the front page.

I love when 2 DJs live-code together (on the same document! Editing each other's loops) or when a VJ live-codes some visuals in reaction to the DJ live-coding the music.

If you're interested in ChuCK, there's also Pure Data (a FOSS cousin of the commercial Max/MSP) and SuperCollider and a lot of live coding algorave sorta music things are built on top of SuperCollider like TidalCycles so you can execute lines of code live via a REPL or evaluating blocks of code in a document and generate beats in realtime.

Tidal Cycles! https://tidalcycles.org/

As layer8 mentioned, it is technically Haskell but more specifically a DSL and environment for live coding music.

Pretty fun to play around with!

After digging deeper, I've found TidalCycles tidalcycles.org and that's my favorite Livecoding software. Now you can start programming music without any cost.

The code written in this regard can be found here. My contributions focused on designing, implementing and integrating the Sequence module with the help of the Context module.