Programming languages used for music | Hacker News Reader

Programming languages used for music

timthompson.com

316 pointsofalkaed105 comments

Switch Angel live-code using Strudel. Really impressive and interesting stuff.

I've watched a couple of her stuff, it's really inspiring and feels very cosy, like a slice of Internet that lives on its own and creates without being too bothered about the Algorithm™.

Yeah love her stuff. And honestly the voice description is part of the music flow at this point.

I feel like that’s kinda how people imagined navigating whatever cyber domain when the first big cyberpunk novels came out

Just to add some context, Strudel is TidalCycles ported from Haskell to JS. IMO, Haskell is a much nicer language for this stuff. Hopefully, now that GHC can output WebAssembly, someone can build a web-based music programming environment around the original TidalCycles instead.

Is there feature parity? Strudel might be ahead by now?

The person in that video really has an ear for synthesis. I've spent quite some time watching all the strudel videos and this creator consistently shows the best skill across genres.

This was epic, and reminded me of the magic of programming when I first found a video game maker at a wee 11 years old.

Writing code to make music feels so natural to me (a musically inept, but proficient coder) and this breaks down so many barriers.

I wonder how Cursor fares with Strudel so far.

Dunno about Cursor, but Claude code > codex, in my experimentation, but that was before 5.2.

This is pretty incredible to watch. I initially thought she must be pulling some kind of trick to make that look so fluid, but the fact that she is making very small typos and correcting them as she goes make it look very believable. This is really the first time I've watched someone use one of these tools and it feel like a musician using a new kind of instrument.

Yeah, she's got several videos, and shorts, where she does this. It's clear she really, really understands how to do what she wants to achieve!

Yeah, I'm watching more. These are incredible. I really like how she describes what she's doing in tempo with the music as she does it. The description is basically part of the performance. Really unique and engaging approach.

If you go back to the older videos she has like a decade of experience messing around with modular synths to make music live that is actually listenable.

She is also a main developer on the strudel project. If you want to contribute, it is open source:

https://codeberg.org/uzu/strudel

As a producer, wow. She can visualize the outcome she wants without ever seeing much at all. That takes a ton of skill. Insanely impressive video.

I think the videos are done live, but she plans them out, she isn't just winging it.

she is a producer, not making anything innovative music wise (she must have done similar things thousands of times), with a long experience in live music, and she is a/?the? core dev of the tool she is using.

honestly i think the planning is at most a few minutes long (once she decides what she will go for) then she probably let the experience talk.

This is one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos, and it's of her coding music - https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M

In order, the most popular ones of these are probably

* Max. It's built into a popular DAW, and is shockingly capable as an actual programming language too. The entire editor for the Haken line of products is written in Max.

* Pure Data or Supercollider.

* Csound.

Not ordering things like Scala or LilyPond that are much more domain-specific.

When I was first introduced to Max it was on a Mac SE in 1989, and I really only used it for saving & restoring patches (on my SY77 and U110) until someone walked me through how it really worked. I didn't understand what it could do, and I rejected it at first because it was too open-ended for me to see utility. Lol. How things changed after that.

What really blows my mind is that I wasn't at all put off by the tiny little Mac monitor, it just seemed normal. No way I could work with such a small b&w screen today I'd go mad. (weirdly I feel less creative than i did in the 1980's and NOW i have near infinite recording & mixing options. The irony.)

I learned programming with csound in the 90s but for me, Pyo and Librosa means there is no reason for a specialized language outside of python.

There is value in what has already been built for these languages but once you move beyond that, life is so much easier to just use python.

Cecilia5 is a great example of that being rewritten from csound to pyo.

Csound is funny because it's everywhere in the lineage, but relatively few people seem to arrive at it organically now

Csound (I think v3) was the first music language I played with, back in the early 90s, under DOS even. Back then, running in real-time wasn't a thing. Generate a WAV file and play it after the program finished. Later, at the end of the 90s, I remember playing with CLM/CM, in common lisp.

But the most productive experience was definitely SuperCollider. I can only recommend giving it a try. Its real-time sound synthesis architecture is great. Basically works sending timestamped OSC messages AOT (usually 0.2s). It also has a very interesting way of building up so-called SynthDefs from code into a DAG. I always wondered if a modern rewrite of the same architecture using JIT/AOT technology would be useful. But I digress... SC3 is a great platform to play with sound synthesis... Give it a try if you find the time.

I can vouch for the tutorial series from Eli Fieldsteel[0] for getting into SuperCollider and audio synthesis in general. If you were ever curious on how to bridge the gap between signal processing and music theory through mathematical operations, I think this is one of the best series out there.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzsOOiJ_p4&list=PLPYzvS8A_r...

Almost an esolang, but orca is an amazing example of spatial programming for music production (GH https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca and video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSFrBFBd7vY to see it in action)

Is this the one from the hippie(non perjorative) group living off a boat?

If it’s the same, it’s one that if I win the lottery I’d spend my time learning along with this tool from Imogen https://mimugloves.com/

I don’t think I’d ever produce something worth listening to, but if I won the lottery, why would I care beyond my own enjoyment?

Yeah it's from 100r https://100r.co/site/projects.html!

‘Your own enjoyment’ is a rich reward. My unsolicited advice: Try making a mess with it everyday for a week / month / year and see if you don’t start to appreciate something in what you make. Orca is a brilliant piece of work.

My own enjoyment was predicated on the money side. If I was independently wealthy I’d be splitting my time between this and gem faceting as hobbies

That screenshot is super interesting, never seen anything like it.

It's giving me some ideas for a TUI video editor using that grid interface. What a cool project.

Sonic Pi is missing imo. (Some have mentioned Strudel, it’s a similar live-coding music platform). Admittedly Ruby-based, but it seems some of the other ones on the list are libraries/forms of other langs too.

Sonic Pi is by far the most accessible way to play with these tools. It's designed to teach music and coding to kids and has great starter tutorials, and a ton of depth as well. Check it out!

Looks interesting, but I think it's a little dated- sadly most of the links I tried on this page don't seem to be active anymore?

Here's a currently active list on github in case somebody's left needing a fix of music programming: https://github.com/zoejane/awesome-music-programming

Most of the languages on the list have not been maintained in decades with many being for functionally extinct if not completely extinct systems. It is not really a list meant to guide you to a language to use, it is more about historical/academic interest.

Relevant to this discussion - my project Glicol (https://glicol.org) addresses this space. Currently working on a no_std rewrite, demo coming next year :)

Curious, would the rewrite allow for building on hardware platforms such as the Daisy?

Or maybe it is already possible, to be fair I haven't looked closely.

https://daisy.audio/hardware/, https://github.com/electro-smith/libDaisy

of course I already got a poc a while ago:

https://github.com/chaosprint/daisy-rust-playground

but for now my main mcu is rp2350

Awesome, will check it out!

I really hope that Max becomes fully accessible in a text based format one day. It's so cool and I've spent a few months randomly through the years building neat plugins for Ableton but, for me, it would be so much stickier if it was code. Especially now with AI assistance, Claude can still be helpful but it hallucinates a lot harder when trying to describe visual code.

you can get the LLM to output max patches in JSON and copy paste directly into max. it was pretty decent at it when I tried and would probably be even better with relevant recent documentation in context.

Would love to see this, as someone who has been heavily using Live since 2006 and is finally getting into proper coding in middle-age. Having a way to augment Live in a text-based coding format would be greatly welcome.

While I'm not holding my breath, Ableton the company are transitioning into a steward-ownership model in which the stewards will have decision rights over the company. So I have hope that it will continue to grow in ways that are less affected by market considerations and that are a little more opinionated and specialized. Not to mention that Ableton own Cycling 74 (creators of Max/MSP).

So it's not out of the realm of possibility.

you can use Javascript with Max. It's a bit unwielding in its handling of multi-JS-file projects, but it can be done.

Not everything in Max is exposed to your code, but you really can do a lot from the JS side of things.

I had no idea! And I'm learning Javascript, so that's a nice coincidence.

I was deep into Max/MSP around 2010 and made a personal vow to leave it alone. The potential to reinvent the wheel and build tools instead of completing records was too much.

Now I'm in a more mature place, so I could see myself diving back into it eventually.

Max is basically a programming language already: message passing, scheduling, state, abstraction, even metaprogramming

Great compilation. The ".cgi" in the URL clearly tells me this is an old collection of links :-)

Another fun esoteric music language missing in the comments is ORCA: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca

I love seeing a Definition List (DL/DT/DD html tags) in the wild. Often more hassle than its worth to make them appear the way you want, but semantically pleasing and underused.

combine it with a <details> and <summary> inside the <dd> and a little CSS checkbox toggle for JS-less "show all details"/"hide all details" and it's pure gold.

Their structure in the markup can be a bit confusing imo - something more like a <figcaption> inside a <figure> or a <legend> inside a <fieldset> would be much nicer imo.

The spec even mentions [0] that you're allowed to use <div>s to group dt/dd pairs for styling purposes.

[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

I use SQL for music: https://github.com/ClickHouse/NoiSQL

Very cool! Found this note interesting:

```

Limitations

I haven't, yet, found a good way to implement filters (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, etc.). It does not have Fourier transform, and we cannot operate on the frequency domain. However, the moving average can suffice as a simple filter.

```

I wonder if there's a way to implement the FFT using subqueries and OVER/partitioning? That would create a lot of room for some interesting stuff to happen, specifically making it easy/possible to implement filters, compression, reverberation, and other kinds of effects.

Two other primitives that would be valuable to figure out: 1. How to implement FM/phase distortion. You can basically implement a whole universe of physical modeling if you get basic 6 op sine wave primitives right with FM + envelopes. 2. Sampling/resampling - given clickhouse should do quite well with storing raw sample data, being able to sample/resample opens up a whole world of wavetable synthesis algorithms, as well as vocal editing, etc.

Honestly, although the repo's approach is basic, I think the overall approach is wonderful and have wanted to be able to use SQL to write music for a while. I've spent a lot of time writing music in trackers, and being able to use SQL feels like it would be one of the few things that could spiritually be a successor to it. I've looked at other live coding languages, many of which are well built and have been used by talented people to make good music (such as Tidal, Strudel, etc). But all of it seems like a step down in language from SQL. I'd rather have their capabilities accessible from SQL than have to use another language and its limitations just to get those capabilities.

Food for thought -- thanks for the interesting and thoughtful work!

I recently tripped over Dogalog (live-coding with prolog-like code), which could be an addition: https://danja.github.io/dogalog/

There was a music language made for the Danish GIER machine, made in 1971 (at least the 2nd edition of the handbook is from there)

The handbook for the language is sadly only in Danish so it might not be super interesting: https://datamuseum.dk/bits/30002486

Here is the code for movement 1 and 2 of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: https://datamuseum.dk/aa/gier/30000644.html

Very creative guy operating this site (look at this! https://timthompson.com/spacepalette/) though it looks like it’s been idle the past 4 years or so? The live-coding community around tidal cycles will point you to a the fruit of missing projects like tidal-cycles and strudel. A strong inviting community: https://club.tidalcycles.org/

It's kind of nice that both modes coexist

Strudel.cc ?

No Sonic Pi, which is a Ruby dialect?

Sonic Pi is SuperCollider, but using Ruby instead of the default sclang language. Overtone is similar (and possibly originally by the same developer, iirc?) but using Clojure, and is also missing from the list.

Yeah, that's some glaring omissions - not including Sam Aaron's work makes me distrust the whole list. SonicPi is fundamental for teaching kids music and programming and Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs, that looked sick.

Yesterday i used Claude Code to define and implement a YAML based DSL for playing backing tracks. I can ask an LLM to generate this DSL for any well known song, and it will include chord progression, lyrics, bass, drums, strumming pattern, etc. It's a go command line tool that plays the DSL via midi, and displays the chords, strumming patterns, and lyrics. Also does export to Strudel.

The problem I see is: people are not going to use a project that is AI generated for long really, unless they do it just for a one-off task. I'd like to constantly generate new music. I also have ideas based on existing music so I want to adjust this, but do so programmatically, and that seems ... hard.

Sure, for something big code needs more review and validation. But this is just a small command line tool that allows you to ask an LLM to generate a DSL to play a backing track: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ako/backing-tracks/refs/he...

Not a big commitment from a user, and nothing lost if it doesn´t work as hoped.

I'm just positively surprised how quickly you can create a prototype for these sorts of ideas with Claude Code. This is literally just a few hours of vibe-coding.

Full vibe coded project: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks

Depending on the source music, there are many aspects of this that normally require a license with a records company or some proxy. Especially the lyrics part. Be careful not to get into very expensive trouble. Just because the LLM can do it, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do it.

Yes, I noticed that Claude Code silently refused to generate lyrics for some songs i requested. Benefit of this approach is that anybody can quickly generate a YAML file for a backing track, no need to share it anywhere.

I think the problem is that the artist doesn't get anything with this approach. If you really want to use someone else's music/artworks/lyrics, just buy it.

Most artists don't sell backing tracks though.

It's not like this is very unique, YouTube has tons of training and backing track videos, which is what i typically use. And artist don't sell it in a way that can be consumed for guitar practice easily.

If you ever open-source it, I suspect a lot of musicians who don't think of themselves as programmers would still find it surprisingly approachable

2 days of vibe coding: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks

It's missing "Strudel" and "tidal cycles"

See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@Switch-Angel/videos for examples of strudel in action to create trance music.

There was one on HN a few weeks ago, tailored towards loops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072280

One interesting feature is it has built-in vibe coding, to produce an LLM-generated loop program to start one's creative journey.

Musicabc has some really nice JS and Obsidian plugins that essentially allow you to create little scrapbooks of musical ideas in markdown that are also playable as sound and viewable as sheet music.

https://abc.hieuthi.com/

Music Lab by Code.org is a Blockly-based experience, built for K-12 education, at https://code.org/music.

It's open source, and we wrote some technical documentation at https://github.com/code-dot-org/code-dot-org/blob/600ebafa52....

There were a bunch of interesting aspects to this project. One of my favorite things was developing the user programming model. Organizing your music using functions is very powerful.

There is some sound and music functionality in the Wolfram Language:

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SoundAndSonifica...

I saw a post about the SKOAR language here on HN in late 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180423

In the comments, I saw reference to MML ( Music Macro Language ... not exactly what I think the MML is on the list. ) Here's the one referenced in the HN post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Macro_Language

At the time, I built a small interpreter that included MML as an embedded language, but I don't think I have the (Windows) binaries handy.

It isn't mentioned there, but you all might be interested in the python music libraries called SCAMP: https://scamp.marcevanstein.com

I learned about it after stumbling across the creator's short, fun videos showing it being used: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_yUKG0GRuliL65l_qEG1uwCC... ("Python Music Shorts")

I kind of want to create music programmatically but so far it has been way too difficult. I also can barely find anything useful via oldschool google search anymore. I am almost stuck like with MIDI here ...

ever tried Pd or max?

SuperCollider also has some traction, and is in the same genre as max and pd.

Claude code is good at coding and music theory. IMHO, there is not need for a dedicated language.

BTW. I've played with LLM in sound design tasks recently. Vibe coded MCP server for Waldorf Blofeld gave me good results. Sorry, no demo.

Strudel is my favorite, it has pretty syntax, and their interactive guide (with inline REPL) is extremely well done too.

https://strudel.cc/workshop/getting-started/

Opus Modus (mentioned there) is quite notably Common Lisp

Surprised no mention of Alda. I’ve only tinkered with it, but it’s clever:

https://alda.io/

There's a community in NYC called Livecode that hosts in person events for programming music and it's awesome

This sounds sick! I wonder if there's something similar in Seattle.

Here's a list of global locations: https://livecode.nyc/network

I have been using ChucK for a long time. Like others here, I appreciate Max/Pure Sound but would rather use my text editor.

  Delay delay;
  LPF filter;
  Reverb reverb;
  Gain feedback;
  
  adc => delay => filter => reverb => dac;
  filter => feedback => delay;

I'm curious what you did with it? I spent a little time with ChucK with the Oxford Laptop Orchestra (as was) which was an offshoot from the Princeton one. I was there as a technologist, not a musician. Always had a soft spot but never found myself using it again.

I mostly use it for learning things. How does this guitar pedal effect work? Why does this Eurorack module sound so good? How can I drive this MIDI instrument from this OSC controller? etc.

Ideally there would be an easy path from ChucK to implementing all of these things in hardware but I haven't quite got there yet.

https://github.com/heuermh/lick

Wow that's a serious amount of work! I might take another look.

The best demo for music programming language demo I can found is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c&t=374s, The concert programmer.

i was transcribing some songs for violin after picking it back up (mostly metal, which i have to take some liberties with to sound good on a violin + kick drum :> ), and thought about writing a language (maybe a rust steel module) to hand the typesetting for me, as writing out & erasing e.g. slurs can take a while. but lilypond really is good enough that there wasn't much about it i'd want to change, either syntactically or semantically (as really, i only need a very small subset of it). any language i do write, if i choose to, would probably use it as a backend --- its rendering is very good :)

have you figured out a good tool flow for going from music to transcription?

I've used ai.splitter to generate stems, but need to go and identify tones and notes before plotting on to a sheet of music. I'm looking at doing this as a beginning cello student.

to be honest, i've been playing violin for a number of years and my strategy is still to listen to a part of the song, rewind until i can play it (even if slowly), then write that down. some of the pieces i want to write down are twin-guitar pieces, where i need to (generally) choose the melodic guitar over the harmonic. i haven't found AI good at that, but, thinking now, i haven't tried it in years, so it may have gotten good enough? sorry for the lack of much insight, lol. (for metal, finding tabs online can at least help with the rhythm, so i just need to try and transcribe the notes & flourishes).

Haskell is also a popular choice for music production and live music performance.

https://youtu.be/XYe8AKYPUYc?si=ZYP4QM5FLn00-5u6

It’s quite new, but I’ve been interested to try out this Rust-y syntax language that compiles to SuperCollider: https://vibelang.org/

Oh wow, first I hear of this one, quite interesting! How did you come across it? The vscode extension seems quite neat too, excited to try it out.

IIRC on r/rust.

And at least 5 times a year someone designs a new one where it is painfully obvious that they're almost entirely unaware that anyone has ever designed one before - or if you're very lucky, maybe they've heard of ABC.

This list is such a time capsule in the best way

There is also literate programming for music, right? Just like Donald Knuth describes it in his literate programming approach? See for example the videos by Fauci etc. They say things like eh eh, pause then play music using items such as a pen, there is even a conductor. Very entertaining. Is that true? Or just my imagination?

Max is great.

A few months ago I outlined a spec for a new modern programming language inspired by LilyPond I call Capo. I haven’t done anything with it yet but the idea is that it compiles to MNX, which is the (still in development) successor to MusicXML, becoming a language that could be used as a scripting language in any program that supports MNX or as a standalone text-based music tool. Thought this group might find it interesting: https://github.com/Capo-Lang/capo

Can you give a rundown on how it differs from lilypond? What deficiencies you are addressing?

It’s mostly just for fun, but lilypond has a bit of outdated syntax in modern programming terms. The main difference though is that lilypond compiles to music engraving, whereas capo compiles to a more universal file format that can then be used to engrave, or inserted into another file, or opened in another program.

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