cl-collider VS overtone

Sure! There are Common Lisp bindings to SupperCollider: https://github.com/byulparan/cl-collider which can be used to program music interactively.

I'm using https://github.com/byulparan/cl-collider and https://github.com/defaultxr/cl-patterns. And you can of course use SuperCollider with sclang.

> 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.