Alex McLean writes about Tidal, a Haskell-based language for live-coding music, and related ideas on patterns and programming.
Commenters point to it as a prime example of live-coding music in Haskell, and as a way into algorave without deep technical knowledge.
Keep in mind there are actually two domains in music: instruments (sound synthesis) and orchestration. Both Skoar and Alda (which was linked yesterday) are only orchestration languages.
I've been researching about this and narrowed down by these criteria: (1) Modern and maintained (2) Open source (3) Multiplatform (4) Supports live coding (5) Not MIDI-only output (6) Text-based (7) Not Java (sorry JSyn :P)
For me live coding is important since I prefer to compose music in an exploratory fashion. Also, live performances are cool. Read more about live coding and resources in http://toplap.org
The list in no particular order (beware of the brain dump):
·
## Overtone (https://overtone.github.io/)
The coolest kid on the block is actually a frontend to SuperCollider.
- Clojure based.
- VJ-ready. Integration with Processing via Quil (https://github.com/quil/quil) and GLSL shaders via Shadertone (https://github.com/overtone/shadertone).
- Lots of tooling: https://github.com/overtone
·
## SuperCollider (https://supercollider.github.io/)
- Object-oriented functional language (similar to Smalltalk/Ruby/C/JS).
- Basically Overtone minus Clojure minus VJ plus IDE.
- Client-server architecture (which is what allows Overtone to use it as a backend).
·
## Sonic Pi (http://sonic-pi.net/)
- Ruby DSL + IDE.
- Built for Raspberry PI (but runs anywhere SuperCollider and Ruby are available).
- Another frontend to SuperCollider.
- Designed to be suitable for teaching children.…
this is a live coding language, so trying to achieve what tidal and overtone are. EDM type genres have recognizable formulas for the drum and bass, and then for pads and leads above so all these environments are trying to abstract over patterns at different levels of the music.
i can't find a real tutorial, but there's lots of material to look at: https://github.com/overtone/overtone/wiki/Getting-Started
and this is the 1st ref: http://akustik.hfbk.net/publications/LiveCodingInLaptopPerformance.pdf
in this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding
___________
tidal: http://yaxu.org/tidal/
disclaimer: I've been playing synths a fair amount and i have a hard time understanding a lot of stuff on the overtone cheat sheet
I haven't actually used Self, but from reading the paper, discussion of embodiment, tangible objects, and direct manipulation makes it interesting from a visual perspective.
Personally I think all computer languages are textual by definition, and vary in the amount of extra visual support for syntax and more often secondary notation. The Reactable perhaps pushes beyond this limit by making proximity and orientation part of the syntax, but still is basically about composing textual symbols.
If we're doing that thing, I wrote a chapter on this in my thesis :) http://yaxu.org/thesis/
[ For the benefit of any others, here's a link to Sean's preprint: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf ]
I've mentioned this before, but there's a lot of music stuff written in Haskell - tidal[0] (DSL for live-coding electronic music, not the 'save Jay Z from penury for $20/month' initiative that has just clobbered its google results) and Euterpea[1] spring to mind.
[0] http://yaxu.org/tidal/
[1] http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea/
I found this article very difficult to read, and while it talks a lot about procedural music, I don't think that any of the people it covers are making any except the "Birthday Song Crew", who are clearly geniuses.
It did, however, introduce me to http://yaxu.org/tidal/ which is going to force me to finally learn Haskell.
You don't need to know anything about the physics of sound or programming, to get algoraving with Tidal or Ixi Lang
http://yaxu.org/tidal/
http://www.ixi-audio.net/ixilang/