Interesting ! Not that far from the new Common Lisp based language OMN brought by Opus Modus which was released early this year http://opusmodus.com/omn.html
Alda: A music programming language
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#42Getting "Illegal Argument Exception" when running it.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#43I've had a lot of experience with various musical languages (ChucK, Csound, Supercollider, Max/MSP, PD, Faust etc.) I've even designed a few music languages for myself. For what it's worth, I did go to a music school and graduated with a bachelors degree in music, with a strong focus in computer music composition. In the case of Alda, I'm a little underwhelmed. To be fair, it seems that the author of this software ha…
I really appreciate your input, and given your background with audio programming languages, I completely understand how you would be underwhelmed with where Alda is right now.
I do have pipe dreams of making Alda way, way more extensive than it is right now. MIDI ended up being the easiest thing to implement as a sort of proof of concept, but I am completely open to (in fact, am really hoping for) a wide array of music generators at the disposal of Alda's syntax. The next major milestone will be waveform synthesis, probably via a Java library like Minim (my original idea was to control Supercollider via Overtone, via Alda, but it seems there are too many setup issues involved, when compared to a self-contained Java library that I can use from Clojure).
Being able to generate code in other audio programming languages is also a thought I've had -- if not for Alda, then for a spinoff project. The primary thing that inspired me to create Alda was that I love the unbounded potential behind these more robust languages like ChucK and Csound, but the syntax of these languages could be greatly simplified and adapted for use by composers with little-to-no programming experience. I guess my point is that Alda prioritizes aesthetics and simplicity over being a Turing-complete language that lets you do everything you want.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#44This is pretty neat. But I found it quickly getting very hard to read towards the bottom. I feel if there's a computer interpreting some sort of language, that it should have a built in notion of the circle of fifths -- why should I give the computer absolute notes, when everything in music is so relative. Maybe viewing the notes in terms of do,re,mi would make sense, within the context of being in some key; then jum…
I think this is a key thing to notice about Alda. It doesn't attempt to provide abstractions for things like keys, scales, or even measures and time signatures. It's more like writing Markdown: you already know what you want to write; it just gives you a way to represent it in a compact way and turn it into something you can hear back without having to reason too much about what you've written. I want Alda to be as close as possible to a sheet of staff paper that you can write notes on. MML is a very similar language in this regard. The idea is that it's up to the composer to write down the exact notes he/she wants, exactly how he/she wants them.
I realize this is disappointing if you're looking for something with more abstractions, but on the bright side, I think there are some great languages out there that do exactly that. If you haven't already, have a look at Music-Suite ( http://music-suite.github.io/docs/ref ) and Overtone ( http://overtone.github.io ), along with the Leipzig library, which adds functional programming abstractions for use with Overtone ( https://github.com/ctford/leipzig )
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#45Can this language produce an actual grand staff notation, e.g. in a pdf format? I'd like to use to write down compositions, but it would need that feature to be useful. If I could write down compositions in Vim that would be killer.
Not yet... but it's on my to-do list. At some point, we will hopefully be able to generate LilyPond ( http://lilypond.org ) scores from Alda code.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#46This is pretty cool. Good work!
Couple things come to mind.
1. Is there a way to play a selected segment of the music rather than the whole file? While composing, replaying a segment over and over again is quite common. Don't want to start from the beginning every single time.
2. Is there a way to produce music sheet (PDF or PNG) from the source? There would be really useful.
3. Is there a way to format the notes into measures? I know the | is optional and ignored. Can the program do reformat and automatically divides the notes into measures?
4. Emacs integration would be great. Using Emacs to edit. Do ^X^E to execute the program to play the selected segment.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's an entry method for writing MIDI. I'd suggest no one needs yet another text-to-MIDI system. There are plenty of existing methods that do the job just fine - from live recording, to step entry, to any of the hundred or so text-based systems that have been (re)invented since the 1950s. (And which hardly anyone uses, because for most people - even most programmers - ASCII turns out to be a really clumsy and diffic…
> I'd suggest no one needs yet another text-to-MIDI system. Well, I need one. What are you gonna do about it? > And which hardly anyone uses, because for most people - even most programmers - ASCII turns out to be a really clumsy and difficult way to write a non-trivial score. Check again. There are large communities around cli tools for music, especially in electronic and experiemental scenes.
>What are you gonna do about it?
Suggest you look at abc2MIDI, which has been around since 2002:
http://abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/original/README.txt
>There are large communities around cli tools for music,
Actually there aren't. The biggest community is around Max, with PD a close second, and both are dataflow languages, not clis, although they have code affordances.
Most musicians don't get on with cli's at all. (I know this because I've sometimes tried to teach them.) Judging by mailing list volumes, actual volunteer user numbers - i.e. excluding students who have to learn them on courses before giving them up - are in the hundreds of users for each of the most popular clis, as a world wide total.
Trackers are a lot more popular - but they're a different subculture.
In any case, ALDA is barely a cli for music - it's a very simple ASCII music specification with a bare bones GM runtime, and it has some important features missing. (n-tuplets or chord symbols or key signatures?)
For a non-trivial cli look at Common Music, Csound, SuperCollider, Overtone (which runs on Clojure), ChucK, Impromptu, or even Sonic Pi, all of which do quite a bit more.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author mentions IDEs like Guitar Pro, etc. He referred to them as "distracting."
And I understand that. What I meant is something completely different - like a set of autocompletion rules for chords and scales, "debugging" abilities (like selectively playing particular voices or parts of song) and other stuff that makes programming... err, composing in Alda easier. Obviously reusing some already existing text editor, like Vim, Emacs, Sublime or Atom will be the way to go when creating such "IDE".…
I was about to say this, exactly! I could easily see something like this kind of functionality in the form of a Vim plugin or Emacs mode.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#49Besides this being rad - you can see in the Alda repl screeny that the author has earthbound behind it. I love that game.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#50This looks great, I'll definitely be doing some experimenting! Any way to save the output to an audio file when you're done rather than just hearing it through Alda?
Not yet -- I've had this feature on my mind for a long time, though. It's pretty high up on the to-do list.
This is far from ideal, but as a workaround, you could set up a sound recording program like Audacity to record system audio output and play your score.
Hopefully in the near future you'll be able to do something like "alda play --file my-score.alda --output my-file.wav" or something to that effect.