csound VS alda

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.

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...