alda VS overtone

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...

> Midi being an “artist” tool places it more as a medium like paint.

I’ve used MIDI “as paint”.

Written music using code to MIDI(1), and wrote “cross instrument” music, ie using my keyboard as drum machine.

But these days MIDI is chiefly an archival method for me.

Every time I touch my keyboard is recorded, is much smaller than a comparable audio recording, by design “forced fidelity” in the recording, and I am able to pipe the MIDI format through transcription software (which would be near impossible from an audio recording today).

(1) http://overtone.github.io/

I've never actually used it myself. I've preferred systems that talk to SuperCollider, like overtone, because it's already rock solid and has lots of good DSP built in.

Thanks. I don't know to what extend its "better-because-of-clojure" but I also found overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone which should be good fun (though the underlying synthesizer is supercollider/C++).

You might want to look at Overtone, which is a clojure environment built on top of overtone, and which integrates with processing and a few other similar things.

https://overtone.github.io/

> I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point.

The you'd probably have hated its predecessor which was all about the parentheses: https://overtone.github.io/

It's too bad that superficial stuff like which characters you need to type is holding you back. Getting used to Ruby when you're familiar with Python is no big deal. I would just stick with it

There's a project you may find interesting: https://overtone.github.io/. Besides sound/synthesis stuff, it has https://github.com/overtone/midi-clj library, which allows you to write MIDI as lisp (Clojure, to be precise) code. Emacs has great support for Clojure programming (via Cider), and REPL-based development is perfect for writing music.