Alda: A music programming language

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.

Loops, if statement, variables and incrementers. Maybe a "key change" we can up X semi-tones after a keychange keyword without rewriting the notes.

WHen i look at a Bach score as a pianist, i just kind of flow thru it, if i see it as a guitar score, i think of the simplest fingering patterns (CAGED patterns are the simplest framework), a woodwind player wants to pinpoint the large intervals and octave breaks and other difficulties where intonation and tone become tricky

(whereas with somebody laying out a c++ project or studying Baby Rudin (real analysis), you can't explain it in terms of muscle memory

I think you took what I said too literally. I explained that my hypothesis was that --over millions of years-- our brains evolved excellent pattern matching and semantic association capabilities for various reasons. For example, quick recognition of predators, food, danger, falling rocks, sounds, language, etc.

I am proposing that it is this capability --evolved for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with math, music or other notation-- that makes us really good at using notation to quickly communicate and receive a range of things.

A road sign can communicate a turn or the potential for falling rocks or danger with a simple symbol. I think our brains evolved capabilities that just happened to also make them really good at notation, hence my use of the term "tuned". It isn't that our brains are specifically tuned for musical notation or that a particular gift is required for this, we are good at this due to millions of years of evolving a set of capabilities that make us good at it because they are, for lack of a better term, symbiotic.

> Music notation is noriously difficult to learn for most people

That is simply not true. Don't equate not making an effort to it being difficult. Five year old's are learning musical notation at school every day. It's easy. You just have to put in the effort AND practice.

> and many non-classical musicians avoid it entirely.

Because they don't want to put in the effort. I know many. They simply have no interest in doing the work. And, in most cases, they suffer for it because they can't advance past the stage they are on. Yes, musical prodigies who can't read a single note do exist. That's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the billions who approach music at any level. In other words, an aberration.

Coding is easy. But it requires effort. People who can't code (my wife, for example) are not missing a gene or neural connections. They either lack the interest to learn or don't want to put in the requisite work. To say that only certain people can learn to code is just plain wrong.

> Maybe it's just self-selection. Those with a natural gift for reading are likely to become classically trained musicians

Reading traditional musical notation does not imply one is classically trained. My three kids can read notation just fine and play piano, saxophone and guitar. They are not classically trained. They are learning about music in a fun and relaxed way both in school and at home.

And all of it is firmly rooted in having use of a notation that enables them to read, write and communicate music. The band at the local middle school has a bunch of kids who communicate through traditional musical notation, some having never had any music training at all.

If a five year old can do it there's no excuse for an adult not to unless there's something fundamentally wrong at some cognitive level that truly prevents them from learning notation. I would suspect such a person would have far serious problems in life than not being able to read music.

Every single frustrated musician I've ever met has exactly the same problem: can't read music and lack of discipline to develop technically and musically. Notation is the foundation upon which the rest builds because, historically, this is how music has been taught and this is how you communicate and read everything from the first scales you play up to the score for the Brandenburg Concerto's.

I don't have a problem with alternative notations. Many have been tried. Whether they are for data entry or performance is semantics. It's music notation. And none have yet proven to do a better job than traditional notation. I'm happy to be wrong on this point but if you've ever read an orchestral score I challenge you to do better with any other notation. Pretty tall order.

Someone mentioned forms of music that don't quite fit traditional western notation. Well, it's a given, there are edge cases that don't fit traditional solutions. I say, live long and prosper. Use whatever works for that type of music. That means absolutely nothing when it comes to what we are discussing.

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 difficult way to write a non-trivial score.)

> 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 asked the author about the use case.

Sometimes we create solutions for non-existing problems. I've done that myself lots of times.

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.

In other words, for writing anything other than repetitive game music that sounds like bubble gum you have to have years of training and experience with one or more instruments. And that, invariably, implies learning music traditionally.

Yes, there are lots of amazingly gifted musicians who can't read traditional scores. I would venture to guess these people think differently and that they also have a number of limitations because of their unconventional path in music. Yes, there are corner cases where their brain simply seems to be wired for music (cases like autistic kids). Yet, from my experience, the vast majority of self-taught musicians (I'll venture to say 99%) hit very hard walls that prevent them from developing musically and technically.

I had to spend years developing technique and musicianship on classical guitar before being able to approach music at a certain level. This meant years of serious discipline playing scales and all sorts of didactic pieces and exercises to develop the hands, timing, musical sensibilities, etc.

Reading notation is a SMALL part of what it takes to become a musician and a composer. It's something that happens over the years as you become those things. Just like a Chinese kid becoming good at reading and writing something that to most outsiders seems impenetrable.

> Tons of self-taught musicians can't handle it

That's only because self taught musicians, for whatever reason, do not put in the effort to learn the notation. It isn't because it is difficult or impossible to learn. You don't have to be gifted or have a special trait to be able to learn or "handle it".

There's nothing wrong with being self-taught. Some people want to screw around with music and instruments. And that's great. From that to say that these people are going to write scores and need a tool they can use without having to learn traditional musical notation is a huge stretch. The overwhelming majority of self-taught musicians amount to nothing and are far from being able to compose music. This is not a put-down. This is reality. There's a lot more to becoming a musician than notation. Notation, as I said above, is a minuscule part of it (yet very important).

The idea that there are people out there who "can't handle it" is preposterous. Want proof? Chinese population: 1.3 billion; India: 1.2 billion; Pakistan: 200 million; Arab speaking: 400 million; I could go on.

Between those countries/cultures alone you have about three billion people who learn, read and use languages far more complex than, say, English, Spanish, French or German. They are taught early on and even little kids have no problem learning. In languages like Mandarin they associate tones, intonation, volume, dynamics and rhythm with the symbols, combinations of symbols and even usage context.

No, claiming that self taught musicians can't handle traditional music notation is just a cop-out. Nothing other than effort prevents them from learning. It really isn't that hard at all. I suppose there could be corner cases here and there, but that's not the norm.

> Besides, the brain doesn't "evolve" in the Darwinian sense in the span of mere centuries that we have had our modern music notation.

You completely missed my point here and distorted what I said.

I did not say that our brains evolved JUST to read musical notation in a few hundred years. 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.

Think of a road sign indicating a left or right turn coming up. Once you learn the meaning you don't even think about it. You see the sign, pattern match, connect it with meaning and make decisions --instantly. We didn't evolve our brains in the last 100 years to recognize street signs, but we did evolve a set of capabilities --perhaps to detect predators, food, whatever-- that make us really good at communicating and receiving meaning from symbols.

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 with trackers, so I'm sure a programming language can be a great fit for some kinds of music.

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.

Also in regards to the parent's interest in having a keybind to autoplay alda files, there is https://github.com/lsegal/atom-runner and with a short snippet in your config you'll have `alt-r` recognize alda files and play them!

For the language-alda package, I'm working on integrating autocomplete support for instruments, markers and attributes. I think I can also add support for atom-runner directly through the language package too.

Between playing around with the langauge and getting tooling support in Atom, my whole Sunday was completely swallowed up! :P