alda VS chords2midi

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...

I made a CLI version of this before, you might want to check out the algorithm to see how I did voice leading: https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi

Looks awesome, love the tab view.

If there other hackers who make music here, I wrote this:

https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi

for writing chord progressions on the command line. I use it for building progressions which I drag into my DAW. It has voice leading, which required me translating an algorithm from 18th century German musical textbook into Python. I don't speak German and there were no unit tests in the 1700s so I'm only fairly certain that it works properly.

I will make a plugin version once ableton supports CLAP.

I ended up creating a lighter version of this for one my projects, 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.

The whole thing 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/

This is cool, I made a similar command line tool for generating the same sort of thing: https://github.com/Miserlou/chords2midi