Comments on: Velato: What if Musical Notes Had Their Own Programming Language?

By: Guitar News Fix - week 1 02/09 | vBoogieman Rock and Metal News

Guitar News Fix - week 1 02/09 | vBoogieman Rock and Metal News — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:15:18 +0000

[...] with Jeff Beck in light of Gibson’s latest tribute guitar. What if musical notes had their own programming language ? Create Digital Music takes an interesting looks at what makes composing music and programming [...]

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:16:39 +0000

I hadn't heard of Cosy and Mish before - thanks for the references! They look like interesting variants on the ABC style of musical text entry, but with different twists that serve different expressive purposes. If a program is generating music more for human than machine performance, it will probably find that MusicXML is a better framework for MIDI. MusicXML is a language for representing common Western music notation, and is widely supported by the leading notation programs. The more that machine performance is the goal, the better that MIDI fits. Several composition toolkits support MusicXML export now, including JMSL, OpenMusic, and Synfire Pro. JFugue also supports it, and several programs offer some level of MusicXML support for abc.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:11:09 +0000

You just got my mind spinning about the live composition possibilities of musical algorithms in video games. I can’t think of any reason it could be done now. Does any game right now have anything like that?

By: divbyzero

divbyzero — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:06:05 +0000

Waffle: You want a language that converts a stream of text into notes? There are actually plenty of options, providing different levels of control and complexity. Things like CSound, ChucK, or Common Music, with assembler, Java, and Lisp -like syntaxes respectively, are powerful enough to do sound design, but can be used to layout whole songs if you have the patience. Things like ABC or my own Mish are focused on the notes -- more like textual sequencers -- so they make it easier to see the big picture.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:15:58 +0000

Peter, just for your reference, the headline says Verlato.

By: JohnP

JohnP — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:22:46 +0000

Not to ignore the point of the thread, but the stacked 4ths in the photo got me going on a nice Herbie Hancock-ish modal thang as I was reading the post.

Who do I send the royalties to, you or Quinn? Actually, as it’s a CC license, I know the answer already. ;)

By: Max

Max — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:26:16 +0000

For me the interesting point of all these examples is the question of maturity and the question of “what use is all of this?”. Some of these systems exist for years and are rather mature; they’re used regularily by (some) composers. So there’s already a history of this approach to take into account when speculating about it’s usefulness.

My impression is that it has evolved into a tool used by (some) composers to assist in composition. It’s like “computer aided design”: the tools don’t paint/compose themselves but are used by the artists in the process of creation. I’m not shure we’ll see really interesting completely “self-generated” music.

By: Loopy C

Loopy C — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:09:49 +0000

stk said: ‘The major difference being, of course, that there are such things as bugs in regular programming – nine times out of ten, a buggy piece of code will just not work.

A â€œbuggyâ€ piece of music, however – well, thatâ€™s far less cut and dry.’

I like that comparison :)

By: WhiteNoise

WhiteNoise — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:58:59 +0000

Cosy is pretty nice. Very easy to understand.

By: mzo

mzo — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:50:33 +0000

Depends on what you are programming. If you are programming as art bugs can be good. For example something like Processing in some respects welcomes buggy code as a means to experiment in the same respects as music. A programming language for music that takes the same mentality as Processing might be a nice step forward.