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Posted by ofalkaed 2 days ago

Programming languages used for music(timthompson.com)
283 points | 94 comments
brendanr 21 minutes ago|
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.

sandebert 20 hours ago||
Switch Angel live-code using Strudel. Really impressive and interesting stuff.

https://youtu.be/aPsq5nqvhxg

george_____t 16 hours ago||
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.
AlexB138 15 hours ago|||
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.
sandebert 15 hours ago|||
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!
cowsaymoo 15 hours ago|||
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

junon 14 hours ago||||
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.
AlexB138 15 hours ago|||
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.
empath75 14 hours ago|||
I think the videos are done live, but she plans them out, she isn't just winging it.
lucyjojo 8 hours ago||
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.

NeutralForest 18 hours ago|||
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™.
AStrangeMorrow 17 hours ago|||
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

lagniappe 16 hours ago|||
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.
ar_lan 16 hours ago|||
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.

fragmede 8 hours ago||
Dunno about Cursor, but Claude code > codex, in my experimentation, but that was before 5.2.
theossuary 15 hours ago|||
This is one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos, and it's of her coding music - https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M
Blackthorn 18 hours ago||
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.

why-o-why 10 hours ago|
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.)

iansteyn 14 hours ago||
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.
jweather 4 hours ago|
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!
bthallplz 2 hours ago||
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")

azath92 22 hours ago||
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)
elxr 11 hours ago||
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.

lovich 20 hours ago||
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?

listenfaster 16 hours ago|||
‘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.
lovich 15 hours ago||
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
NeutralForest 18 hours ago|||
Yeah it's from 100r https://100r.co/site/projects.html!
fnordlord 18 hours ago||
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.
scragz 17 hours ago||
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.
Slow_Hand 13 hours ago||
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.

dr-smooth 11 hours ago||
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.

Slow_Hand 8 hours ago||
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.

rriley 13 hours ago||
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

benrutter 23 hours ago||
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

ofalkaed 23 hours ago|
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.
chaosprint 20 hours ago|
Relevant to this discussion - my project Glicol (https://glicol.org) addresses this space. Currently working on a no_std rewrite, demo coming next year :)
heuermh 17 hours ago|
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

chaosprint 16 hours ago||
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

heuermh 15 hours ago||
Awesome, will check it out!
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