This list is such a time capsule in the best way
Programming languages used for music
101–108 of 108 posts
Re: Programming languages used for music
#102In order, the most popular ones of these are probably * Max. It's built into a popular DAW, and is shockingly capable as an actual programming language too. The entire editor for the Haken line of products is written in Max. * Pure Data or Supercollider. * Csound. Not ordering things like Scala or LilyPond that are much more domain-specific.
Csound is funny because it's everywhere in the lineage, but relatively few people seem to arrive at it organically now
Re: Programming languages used for music
#103I really hope that Max becomes fully accessible in a text based format one day. It's so cool and I've spent a few months randomly through the years building neat plugins for Ableton but, for me, it would be so much stickier if it was code. Especially now with AI assistance, Claude can still be helpful but it hallucinates a lot harder when trying to describe visual code.
Max is basically a programming language already: message passing, scheduling, state, abstraction, even metaprogramming
Re: Programming languages used for music
#104Very creative guy operating this site (look at this! https://timthompson.com/spacepalette/ ) though it looks like it’s been idle the past 4 years or so? The live-coding community around tidal cycles will point you to a the fruit of missing projects like tidal-cycles and strudel. A strong inviting community: https://club.tidalcycles.org/
It's kind of nice that both modes coexist
Re: Programming languages used for music
#105Yesterday 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.
If you ever open-source it, I suspect a lot of musicians who don't think of themselves as programmers would still find it surprisingly approachable
Re: Programming languages used for music
#106Yesterday 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.
If you ever open-source it, I suspect a lot of musicians who don't think of themselves as programmers would still find it surprisingly approachable
2 days of vibe coding: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks
Re: Programming languages used for music
#107A few months ago I outlined a spec for a new modern programming language inspired by LilyPond I call Capo. I haven’t done anything with it yet but the idea is that it compiles to MNX, which is the (still in development) successor to MusicXML, becoming a language that could be used as a scripting language in any program that supports MNX or as a standalone text-based music tool. Thought this group might find it intere…
Can you give a rundown on how it differs from lilypond? What deficiencies you are addressing?
It’s mostly just for fun, but lilypond has a bit of outdated syntax in modern programming terms. The main difference though is that lilypond compiles to music engraving, whereas capo compiles to a more universal file format that can then be used to engrave, or inserted into another file, or opened in another program.
Re: Programming languages used for music
#108It’s quite new, but I’ve been interested to try out this Rust-y syntax language that compiles to SuperCollider: https://vibelang.org/
Oh wow, first I hear of this one, quite interesting! How did you come across it? The vscode extension seems quite neat too, excited to try it out.
IIRC on r/rust.