Posted by ofalkaed 12/20/2025
She is also a main developer on the strudel project. If you want to contribute, it is open source:
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.
I feel like that’s kinda how people imagined navigating whatever cyber domain when the first big cyberpunk novels came out
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.
* 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.
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.)
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzsOOiJ_p4&list=PLPYzvS8A_r...
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?
It's giving me some ideas for a TUI video editor using that grid interface. What a cool project.
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
Or maybe it is already possible, to be fair I haven't looked closely.
https://daisy.audio/hardware/, https://github.com/electro-smith/libDaisy
https://github.com/chaosprint/daisy-rust-playground
but for now my main mcu is rp2350
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.
Not everything in Max is exposed to your code, but you really can do a lot from the JS side of things.
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.
Another fun esoteric music language missing in the comments is ORCA: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca
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...