No one has yet written a quine although I would love to see one -- perhaps outputting its representation in lilypond format.
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).
> “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.
I do both on a professional level and have no idea what this sentence means; that's why I'm asking.
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.
You would create your tone rows and then write your composition. If you follow the rules, then it is also 12-tone serialism.
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):
It would take a lot of practice to improvise Velato, but that would be amazing!
One obvious step is to try to make it bootstrapped. Have the velato compiler be a velato.mid file.
Fascinating project, xpointer!