alda VS textbeat

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 tried it on textbeat which is in python and it wasn't understanding too much, with the exception of how the callstack worked in the parser. My questions may have been too usage-specific and not enough about the internals but I used up all my free usage credits so I couldn't continue.

My text-based music sequencer has some music theory support and it also has a REPL:

https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat

I haven't worked on it in a while, but you might like textbeat (https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat). It's a midi tracker and REPL that lets you type in music theory-like terminology and plays it. It's nowhere near a modern DAW but it's cool for tinkering and learning.

I've used Bitwig as a plugin host for textbeat before and it was quite fun. Textbeat is a project of mine that lets you write music in "plain text" with notation for chords, scales, and articulations. I haven't worked on it in a while though.

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

- [2] https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat

- [3] https://foxdot.org/

- [4] https://sonic-pi.net/

- [5] https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

- [6] https://github.com/emicklei/melrose