Is there some "IDE" for it already or is this going to be my new side project? :)
google emacs
Alda: A music programming language
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#32well, no sound from scratch on linux, clojure-1.7 and icedtea jvm.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonder if VST support is a possibility. Also things like automation, for changing parameters like volume over time. It's easy to see how a programming language can be a good fit for notating certain kinds of music and allowing playback of it. Seems to me like the challenge is to go beyond lining things up neatly to a grid and introducing any kind of "looseness" to the music. Edit: Then again, people do great stuff wi…
Definitely! Though you may already know, aligning notes to exact subdivisions of the beat is called quantization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_%28music%29 Quantized music feels noticeably less organic and lively, to me at least. Audio sequencers like Linux's Hydrogen give you the capability to mess with "lead" and "lag", but it must be done individually for each note and so is fairly tedious. I've used…
Thanks for the info, pydub looks nice! And I suppose that when you have music represented by a text file, as is the case in Alda, you can then use other programs to operate on the text file (for example, you could probably write a script to vary note/rest lenghts a bit using the quant attribute).
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#34I get the thinking behind this, and seems a neat little tool. However, I can't help thinking that the problem the author cites with modern GUIs being too distracting to use is more likely to be solved long term by the likes of StaffPad[0]. This allows you to physically write your notation on a blank digital canvas, meaning the only difference to writing on a blank sheet of physical paper is the tactile contrast of using a stylus rather than a pen/pencil - something that is improving all the time.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is neat, of course. Yet, being classically trained myself and a software engineer, both for 30 years, I have yet to find an alternative music notation system that would make me proclaim I would use it. Emm, this is not an "alternative music notation system" meant for musicians to read music in. It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output). > Someone more qualified…
Sorry, I think you missed all my points and misconstrued others. > It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output). Therefore it is music notation. Also, remember that I am not criticizing the work or the author. I think it's great. I simply fail to see how someone knowledgeable enough to compose music --particularly for multiple instruments-- might use this. That's why I as…
>Therefore it is music notation
Only in that its a notation for music ENTRY. Not meant to be used in the same way as the traditional music notation that you wrote about ("When I look at a traditional score I see and hear the music in my mind pretty much instantly").
That is, it's not meant to be read by players as is, which is the whole point of traditional music notation. It has a very specific, computer related role -- it's the equivalent of clicking on buttons in some GUI based notation software.
Your subsequent comment makes it evident that you haven't gotten what this is meant for:
>For example, one of the cases discussed in the article is classical music. I cannot imagine anyone capable of creating scores for orchestras (or even single instruments) not having years of traditional musical training, which would include reading and writing conventional scores.
This is NOT meant as a replacement for classic notation -- to relieve people from having to read and write it. It's not meant to be printed and handed to musicians as is.
This is for people (including people who KNOW notation), to enter that data in a textual, CLI way, instead of clicking the mouse or doing step entry in Finale. Or, similar to how people enter notes in "trackers".
>That would be silly. My proposal is that the evolution of our brain over millions of years provides us with unique image recognition, pattern matching and association capabilities --that evolved for other reasons, not for music-- that happen to result in us being really good at symbolic notation.
That doesn't make classical notation any particular fit for our brains. It was developed ad hoc, neither organically nor after actual experiment and there's no study proving it's "best" music notation we can have. But that's another story, as, again, this tool is not meant to replace traditional music notation.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I think you missed all my points and misconstrued others. > It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output). Therefore it is music notation. Also, remember that I am not criticizing the work or the author. I think it's great. I simply fail to see how someone knowledgeable enough to compose music --particularly for multiple instruments-- might use this. That's why I as…
Something I've read about Irish folk music, is that putting it into classical notation is awkward. It's precise about what should be flexible, and lacks notation for things that are important. Somebody could play it precisely and professionally off a sheet and get it wrong.
Yes.
Our current notation is just an abstraction created for Western Music -- and specific formal styles at that. It's not even capable of delivering all the nuances of a classical (e.g. romantic period) piece, much less something like Jazz.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is neat, of course. Yet, being classically trained myself and a software engineer, both for 30 years, I have yet to find an alternative music notation system that would make me proclaim I would use it. Emm, this is not an "alternative music notation system" meant for musicians to read music in. It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output). > Someone more qualified…
>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.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#38Is there some "IDE" for it already or is this going to be my new side project? :)
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 definitely didn't mean Guitar Pro/TuxGuitar with Alda as a backend, that would be kinda pointless.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#39I'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've done a lot with Pd and enjoyed the noise-making aspects. I find the composition orientation of Alda appealing, but I would want to be able to pipe in sound from something like a Pd. Any of the above inhabit this middle zone? I particularly like the idea of visual flow programming for synthesis and markup with control flow for composition.
Alda does MIDI out, so you could probably route Alda to PD (PD is really good at handling MIDI signals).
While not graphical like PD, several musical languages make a distinction between the sound design (signal flow and modules) and events (notes, etc).
Csound is the first to come to mind, with it's MUSIC N orchestra + score paradigm. The orchestra syntax (especially the new changes in csound6) lends itself nicely to expressive sound design. Scores, however, are tedious to write by hand. Most Csounders opt to generate these using another program (which in itself is pretty cool, IMO)
ChucK does a similar thing as well, where you can write the signal chain (oscillator => filter => dac) and then you can control it using ChucK's C-like syntax. If you are interested in algorithmic composition and have a stronger background in programming, this is a pretty fun language to work in. That being said, Csound has a much better collection of sound modules.
Not exactly the answer you were looking for, but I hope you can check them both out, as they offer different approaches to computer music composition.
Re: Alda: A music programming language
#40Can 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.