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Programming languages used for music

timthompson.com

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: Programming languages used for music

#41

Switch Angel live-code using Strudel. Really impressive and interesting stuff. https://youtu.be/aPsq5nqvhxg

Yeah love her stuff. And honestly the voice description is part of the music flow at this point.

I feel like that’s kinda how people imagined navigating whatever cyber domain when the first big cyberpunk novels came out

Re: Programming languages used for music

#42
I have been using ChucK for a long time. Like others here, I appreciate Max/Pure Sound but would rather use my text editor.

  Delay delay;
  LPF filter;
  Reverb reverb;
  Gain feedback;
  
  adc => delay => filter => reverb => dac;
  filter => feedback => delay;

Re: Programming languages used for music

#44

Relevant to this discussion - my project Glicol ( https://glicol.org ) addresses this space. Currently working on a no_std rewrite, demo coming next year :)

Curious, would the rewrite allow for building on hardware platforms such as the Daisy?

Or maybe it is already possible, to be fair I haven't looked closely.

https://daisy.audio/hardware/, https://github.com/electro-smith/libDaisy

Re: Programming languages used for music

#45
post #42

I have been using ChucK for a long time. Like others here, I appreciate Max/Pure Sound but would rather use my text editor. Delay delay; LPF filter; Reverb reverb; Gain feedback; adc => delay => filter => reverb => dac; filter => feedback => delay;

I'm curious what you did with it? I spent a little time with ChucK with the Oxford Laptop Orchestra (as was) which was an offshoot from the Princeton one. I was there as a technologist, not a musician. Always had a soft spot but never found myself using it again.

Re: Programming languages used for music

#47
post #42

I have been using ChucK for a long time. Like others here, I appreciate Max/Pure Sound but would rather use my text editor. Delay delay; LPF filter; Reverb reverb; Gain feedback; adc => delay => filter => reverb => dac; filter => feedback => delay;

I'm curious what you did with it? I spent a little time with ChucK with the Oxford Laptop Orchestra (as was) which was an offshoot from the Princeton one. I was there as a technologist, not a musician. Always had a soft spot but never found myself using it again.

I mostly use it for learning things. How does this guitar pedal effect work? Why does this Eurorack module sound so good? How can I drive this MIDI instrument from this OSC controller? etc.

Ideally there would be an easy path from ChucK to implementing all of these things in hardware but I haven't quite got there yet.

https://github.com/heuermh/lick

Re: Programming languages used for music

#49
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you did with it? I spent a little time with ChucK with the Oxford Laptop Orchestra (as was) which was an offshoot from the Princeton one. I was there as a technologist, not a musician. Always had a soft spot but never found myself using it again.

I mostly use it for learning things. How does this guitar pedal effect work? Why does this Eurorack module sound so good? How can I drive this MIDI instrument from this OSC controller? etc. Ideally there would be an easy path from ChucK to implementing all of these things in hardware but I haven't quite got there yet. https://github.com/heuermh/lick

Wow that's a serious amount of work! I might take another look.

Re: Programming languages used for music

#50
post #12

Yesterday i used Claude Code to define and implement a YAML based DSL for playing backing tracks. I can ask an LLM to generate this DSL for any well known song, and it will include chord progression, lyrics, bass, drums, strumming pattern, etc. It's a go command line tool that plays the DSL via midi, and displays the chords, strumming patterns, and lyrics. Also does export to Strudel.

The problem I see is: people are not going to use a project that is AI generated for long really, unless they do it just for a one-off task. I'd like to constantly generate new music. I also have ideas based on existing music so I want to adjust this, but do so programmatically, and that seems ... hard.

Sure, for something big code needs more review and validation. But this is just a small command line tool that allows you to ask an LLM to generate a DSL to play a backing track: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ako/backing-tracks/refs/he...

Not a big commitment from a user, and nothing lost if it doesn´t work as hoped.

I'm just positively surprised how quickly you can create a prototype for these sorts of ideas with Claude Code. This is literally just a few hours of vibe-coding.

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