chords2midi VS extempore

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

I've use a few "live coding" programming environments focused around audio programming where this is also the norm. Extempore ( https://github.com/digego/extempore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c ) is a great example of this.

I grew up in the 70s with the term cybernetics from Norber Wiener, and I liked it before Gibson's Neuromancer in the 80s, so I guess I was inoculated before the pandemic use of the word. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a term being bandied about a bit now (reading Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems, and it is pretty cool [1]; Andrew Sorensen's Extempore as a CPS environment [2]). I also attended the first HOPE in 1994 in NYC and although the press abused the term cyber, it's still cool to me! But the Papa John's stuff was funny.

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-63588-0

[2] https://github.com/digego/extempore

Check out https://github.com/digego/extempore by Andrew Sorenson

Extempore

I'm really fond of the idea of writing music like this.

From all available implementations of the idea, I probably like Extempore (https://github.com/digego/extempore) the most. Extempore provides a low-level C-like language (xtlang) which compiles into LLVM and can be meta-programmed from a variant of Scheme (TinyScheme I believe). This arrangement makes it possible to generate the code for the audio graph from Scheme, compile/optimize it via LLVM, then drive it in a live-coding fashion from Emacs. Best of both worlds (high and low).

My personal, much simpler attempt in this space is Cowbells (https://github.com/omkamra/cowbells) - with this one you can live-code FluidSynth (MIDI soundfonts) from Clojure + CIDER + Emacs, representing musical phrases either via Clojure data structures or an alternative text-based syntax (which is translated into the former by a compiler).