extempore VS Orca

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).

Lastly, something I want to start exploring more, is funky ways to sequence stuff. There's a program called ORCA which is more programming than performing (unless you're into live coding!) but it can make some really neat stuff. That YT channel has a video going over the basics, too. Something like that might be more of a learning curve than you want, but I love the idea of obtuse ways to make melodies.

I love using ORCA for generative experimentation https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

In particular - theres a music environment called Orca that is such a great fit for a Roguelike, and porting it to Rust might be a fun medium-size project.

I've downloaded the Linux zip file from the link above and even after unzipping it and going through those files I can't find anything I'm supposed to be able to open. I've tried checking the MANUAL and the README file on the program's Github but I can't seem to get it going there either.