A music composition language with a functional backbone
www.composeconference.org/2018...
Alda is a music programming language that offers a way to describe a musical composition in the form of a text document. The language has an easy-to-use syntax that is well-suited for both musicians with little-to-no programming knowledge and programmers with little-to-no music theory knowledge. Alda is inspired by existing music/audio programming languages such as MML, LilyPond and ChucK, but aspires to be a general-purpose music programming language that gives composers the power to create music in many different ways, all while maintaining simplicity and ease of use.
In this presentation, I will give a brief introduction to Alda and its purpose. I will provide a lightning-fast tutorial, demonstrating the basic features of the language, accompanied by live audio from Alda's "Read-Evaluate-Play-Loop" (REPL). As I type each snippet of Alda code into the REPL, the audience will hear the result. I will then show and play examples of Alda scores, demonstrating some of the artistic possibilities that can be achieved when writing music as Alda code. This will include an explanation of how one can build a musical score out of modular components, an idea which is at the heart of functional programming, and one which I believe can also be applied to composing a musical score.
About Dave Yarwood
Dave Yarwood is a composer, musician, and software engineer at Adzerk, where he uses Clojure and ClojureScript to build UIs, APIs, and backend services. In his free time, he maintains Alda, a programming language for music composition. Dave holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
13 окт 2018
