openbook VS alda

I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi.

I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics, and so on.

Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note.

0: https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev

1: https://github.com/veltzer/openbook

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...