Velato: A programming language where source code must be a valid MIDI music file | Hacker News Reader

Velato: A programming language where source code must be a valid MIDI music file

velato.net

112 pointsp4bl063 comments

Perhaps it is impossible but I'd love to see a Quine in this language

I believe all but severely limited languages are forced to admit quines, see e.g. https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3982278/the-fixed-p...

Hi, I'm the creator of Velato. I will be reworking the website to include more examples later this year. In the mean time, the latest version of the compiler is on github: https://github.com/rottytooth/Velato

No one has yet written a quine although I would love to see one -- perhaps outputting its representation in lilypond format.

Since you're the author I can ask you directly, what the purpose is of the language. Why did you choose MIDI as a form of representation? What kind of programs are you implementing with it? Where are these programs supposed to be executed, on MIDI instruments?

For fun I suppose? See: esoteric programming languages

Why shoud we suppose if the author himself can give us an authoritative answer?

It's very obvious.

I first made the language (fifteen years ago!) out of curiosity about esolangs and as a first try at writing a compiler. And for fun, yes. Since then, I've written more about multicoding -- the way two readings of code impact each other -- and thought more about the music that results (some links in my comment below). This is the aspect of the language that interests me now.

I chose MIDI since it's a standard and leaves to the programmer the choice of tool to compose the program. There's an IDE in the works geared for live performance of the language (that will not be MIDI, but not ready to say yet how it will work; it has the same lexicon but is quite a different language in practice).

I see, thanks. But is Velato actually conceived to create music, or is the music just a "random" byproduct?

From the top of the original link:

> “Velato offers an unusual challenge to programmer-musicians: to compose a musical piece that, in addition to expressing their aims musically, fills the constraints necessary to compile to a working Velato program.”

It seems like Velato’s purpose is to provide an unusual and interesting creative constraint for people who can both code and write music.

> Velato’s purpose is to provide an unusual and interesting creative constraint for people who can both code and write music

I do both on a professional level and have no idea what this sentence means; that's why I'm asking.

Have you ever sat in front of your favorite DAW version XX and thought, oh wow so many things, what am I going to do?

How about Sonic Pi? Or any modern audio toolset. So much possibility, where to start?

Creative constraint is about opening up pathways by restricting options.

It means come up with a code goal and a music goal, and fulfill both with a Velato program. For example, can you write MIDI file which finds the nth Fibonnaci number and sounds good to your friend when played with a piano instrument (a real one or a sound sample)?

Presumably you code and compose in separate contexts, unlike what the sentence describes

Constraints are not too crazy of a concept. It’s not much different than say, writing a traditional Schoenberg style 12-tone composition.

You would create your tone rows and then write your composition. If you follow the rules, then it is also 12-tone serialism.

Whenever I see questions like this I have to wonder: Do you really lack the creative spark that lets you imagine why something like this would be fun to create?

I guess not everyone can be a genius (like you?)

How did you manage to arrive at that interpretation?

This is a very creative project, congratulations!

One obvious step is to try to make it bootstrapped. Have the velato compiler be a velato.mid file.

Have you ever read Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_? (also published as _Magister Audi_)

Every time I see alternative representations of knowledge/computer code/algorithms it comes to mind.

Would you expect a person to be able to achieve a mastery of this to the point where they could play and control something in an improvisation? Say something like to the character Agatha Heterodyne of Kaja and Phil Foglio's web comic _Girl Genius_ controlling an army of clanks (robots):

https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20061229

Funny you should ask; someone interviewed me about a few of my esolangs for their dissertation last year and referenced the Glass Bead Game.

It would take a lot of practice to improvise Velato, but that would be amazing!

There are times when I worry that the ubiquity of computers is crushing experimentation in computer interface concepts.

_Magister Ludi_ (stupid auto-correct)

Is there any reason why your website does not support HTTPS?

I wish more websites were still HTTP! I can't access most of the modern web from my vintage computers and I see no reason I need security on websites I'm not logging into.

Even for non-login sessions, HTTPS is key. It isn't just about credential protection. It guards against data tampering in transit and is therefore crucial for end-to-end data integrity. What you are saying is basically that you don't care about integrity, fair enough, but many people including me do.

It will move to https when I update it later this year

Extra meta-bonus points if the quine's MIDI notes are from a transcription of a Robert Quine guitar solo!

Fascinating project, xpointer!

A game that is programmed by the music in the game. Something tells me such music would sound a little odd.

I'm a professional composer and amateur programmer. I've been trying to write a Quine in Velato, but seems impossible to me. Source code in Velato are MIDI files, but output is plain text. In order to create a Quine you must design a MIDI that outputs text pseudo code (in Guido, Lilypond, etc. notation) which, when converted back to MIDI will yield the original Midi file. However every print char command in Velato requires at least 8 notes (in MIDI). So there's not a 1 to 1 correspondence like in other programming languages Quines. I'm no computer scientist here but this seems impossible to me.

> Keep in mind that this set of notes is not the actual program; if a MIDI file is created from this progression of notes, the concurrent notes might be interpreted in a different order in the file, and create an invalid program.

Is the order of notes within a chord the _only_ extra info required on top of a musical score? If so, with some "tie-breaker" I think you could encode any Velato program unambiguously in sheet music.

For example, if notes in a chord were interpreted as commands from lowest to highest pitch, you could move notes up and down by octaves to determine the command order. Just a thought... I like the idea of piece-as-program.

I favored the flexibility of ordering concurrent notes differently in MIDI over having the sheet music uniquely define a program. It gives the programmer more choices in how notes can be combined.

But there could be a default ordering -- I would think reading a chord from bottom to top -- for a piece of music where the score came first and the MIDI representation or performance of that score second.

Interesting!

Similar note-based expression can be found on TidalCycles/Strudel. although it's not valid MIDI format anymore, you can use notation like c4, f3, and make them as "pattern". Samples are also supported in the same manner:

https://strudel.cc/

And in my project Glicol, I use only numbers in the seq node. So 60 means middle C. Underscore means rest.

https://glicol.org/

Strange: I submitted this more than 24 hours ago and it still says so on my list of submissions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=p4bl0

But it's the same submission as this one which says it was submitted by me 4 hours ago.

I've been contacted a few times by HN moderation and was asked to re-submit some interesting link that didn't get traction on the first try, but it's the first time that I see a link be re-submitted on my behalf. Is that common on HN now?

Anyway, concerning Velato, I stumbled on it yesterday. I find this kind of esoteric languages (like Piet [1]) quite fun, and thought that others here may enjoy it!

[1] https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

How did you stumble on it?

I'm not really sure because it was one of the tab opened in my mobile browser. My best guess would be that I originally saw this link in a post on Mastodon.

This make me wonder why none of the most popular browsers keep browsing history. At least the track where I surfed

It's funny you link to Piet; I began Velato by asking what would Piet be as music. Some programs are instantly recognizable as Piet while others are hardly recognizable as such; the language has its own aesthetic and yet programmers bring their own style to its set of visual constraints, all through fairly basic rules. In Velato, all notes are read in relation to a root note that can change between commands, even in the middle of a single chord. That was meant to allow for more choice in how a programmer constructs a piece of music.

Years later I interviewed David Morgan-Mar about Piet and his other languages https://esoteric.codes/blog/david-morgan-mar and wrote about the concept of multicoding, where a single text has readings in two systems that shape each other (an image and code, music and code etc) https://esoteric.codes/blog/chef-multicoding-esolang-aesthet...

> I've been contacted a few times by HN moderation and was asked to re-submit some interesting link that didn't get traction on the first try, but it's the first time that I see a link be re-submitted on my behalf. Is that common on HN now?

Not resubmitted but re-upped. That is, we rolled back the clock on it and added some points so that it would get a placement on HN's front page. You can see the stories that get picked this way here: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, and the system is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 and the links back from there.

When a post is older, we email an invite link (as you described) but when it's only a day or two old, we re-up the current submission. That's what happened in the present case. The timestamp munging is an artifact of this re-upping system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Thanks for posting great submissions to Hacker News! Btw, if anyone sees a great submission that could use a re-up or a repost, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. (It's best when the article isn't your own stuff, but rather something that you just think is interesting.)

Meta: for some reason, dates on almost all comments in this submission have been reset minutes ago and the submission resurfaced back to the front page. Possibly an HN bug? (cc: dang)

alternatively, python files can be interpreted as music

https://github.com/vdwees/tone_trace

Glad to see it's written in C#.

Can we get a port in F# please?

https://github.com/rottytooth/Velato

That's called a modulation.

Way to B# !

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