csound VS Tidal

Nobody has mentioned Csound.

Thank you so much for your appreciation ! I'm planning a blog post abou that... but, meanwhile: I use the following free software: 1) Huygens Fokker Scala to tune files (see below which ones); 2) SynthFont (in combination with soundfonts) to play the files tuned by Scala; The files in 1) are text files essentially representing pitches and durations. I set them up by means of an electronic spreadsheet :) Here's a link to Huygens Fokker Scala: http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ The underlying logic is definitely an "abc" one, rather than WYSIWYG. I'm still working under Windows, but I'm trying to switch to Linux, so I could need to replace Scala (which still doesn't install smoothly on recent distros) by Csound: https://csound.com/ 🙂 (Scala doesn't install smoothly on recent Linux distros).

Pure Data, cSound, and SuperCollider are all free and opensource. Incredible possibility, though the learning curb can be steep.

For fun, I took a class in computer music. I still did not know what a synthesizer was. Once class got under way, we started using this archaic horrible piece of software, Csound. Not long into the class, it finally kind of dawned on me that synths exist, what they are and how they work, and I started buying gear. Once I had gear, I really really hated Csound, and I wound up dropping the class (Covid had something to do with that). A lot of things started to make sense (Regular Show, for instance) and I got really interested in sound design.

CSound looks interesting: https://csound.com

csound would be interesting to play with.

So you’re wondering what would making music with code look like? The tools I’m familiar with are TidalCycles, Sonic Pi, and SuperCollider. I’m having a hard time describing what it’s like to make music with tools like these so here’s a video of a performance. One person is live coding the music and the other is live coding the visuals. I think it’s super cool how the music is improvised and built over time by layering commands. Some keywords you could search to see more examples would be Algorave and Livecoding.

https://tidalcycles.org/ is another great example, parsing patterns of text and printing live music.

For sound live coding/algorave sonic pi and tidal cycles are great, both based on supercollider.

I don't know the alternatives but I'm a big fan of https://tidalcycles.org/. People really do crazy things, check out the videos on the front page.

I love when 2 DJs live-code together (on the same document! Editing each other's loops) or when a VJ live-codes some visuals in reaction to the DJ live-coding the music.

If you're interested in ChuCK, there's also Pure Data (a FOSS cousin of the commercial Max/MSP) and SuperCollider and a lot of live coding algorave sorta music things are built on top of SuperCollider like TidalCycles so you can execute lines of code live via a REPL or evaluating blocks of code in a document and generate beats in realtime.

Tidal Cycles! https://tidalcycles.org/

As layer8 mentioned, it is technically Haskell but more specifically a DSL and environment for live coding music.

Pretty fun to play around with!

After digging deeper, I've found TidalCycles tidalcycles.org and that's my favorite Livecoding software. Now you can start programming music without any cost.

The code written in this regard can be found here. My contributions focused on designing, implementing and integrating the Sequence module with the help of the Context module.