In which Lisp generates music | Hacker News Reader

In which Lisp generates music

abhirag.com

6 pointsabhirag7 comments

Livecoding Music with Fennel and Renoise

Sounds nice, thanks. Do you also have experience in other live coding languages? Can you share your thoughts about advantages/disadvantages of Lisp compared to others?

Hey, thanks for taking a look! I have messed around with Clojure (Overtone) and Sonic Pi (Ruby dialect) and normally prefer lisps for anything fun :)

Regarding advantages/disadvantages, Lisp is always very terse which helps and with structural editing juggling parens becomes a non-issue. Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that.

I'm still not sure on which composition language to focus on. I definitely don't like languages where a lot of the syntax is "hidden" in strings (such as e.g. in Tidal). Lisp has aspects which fit to music intuitively, but as soon as you try to represent the full information expected by Midi the code gets messy. Interestingly, Common Music and Nyquist went away from Lisp towards SAL because composers apparently preferred a Pascal like infix syntax over the Lisp way.

I think macros can help when the syntax seems messy, that is where lisp shines the most. Have a look at extempore lang (https://extemporelang.github.io/) you might like it. Macros written by others can feel like magic, but a DSL you create might still feel the most intuitive. I get your point about hidden syntax though.

The only other language I am still curious about trying for livecoding is forth, for example Sporth(https://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth.html)

I'm aware of Extempore and its predecessor, but I think they pretty much have the same problem, with no elegant solution (at least I didn't see one when studying the docs and thesis). Maybe the trick is indeed - as you say - to implement a "sublanguage" with macros to cover the more complex music representation. Forth is an interesting language, but I think it has even more issues to represent musical information.

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