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Cool! I hadn't heard of Overtone before, but I love the idea of live coding music.
People might also be interested in a similar project called Sonic Pi[1], which is Ruby based.
[1]: https://sonic-pi.net/
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).
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).
https://glicol.org
I think the combo of Overtone and Emacs is really cool. Essentially, Overtone, Tidalcycles, Sonic Pi or FoxDot are note generators for SuperCollider. Perhaps the post should mention that.
When people start to care about audio synthesis and "sound-based music", then they will find a missing picture between the pattern-based language abstraction to the audio float numbers. My experience is that if a user does not understand this process, it is very hard to master the language, tend to forget the syntax and is prone to errors.
One example is that before I made Glicol, I made QuaverSeries (https://quaverseries.web.app/), which shares a very similar syntax to Glicol. I would call it a functional wrapper for Tone.js. But as a functional programming language, even I myself forget the input/output type for each function after not using it for a while. Yet in Glicol, this problem is solved from the first day as Glicol's node IO are all audio streams. One reason I call Glicol "the next generation computer music" is partly because we are now in an era when browsers can also handle real-time GC-free audio, and audio-first makes a modern design.
In designing Glicol, my experience is that when one begins from the audio level, it does affect the language design a lot. How to make the trade-off between readability, simplicity and ergonomics for speedy writing in live coding performance, error handing is really an art.