scshepard / alda

A music programming language for musicians. :notes:

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                                    ~ alda ~

A music programming language for musicians

Inspired by other music/audio programming languages such as PPMCK, LilyPond and ChucK, Alda aims to be a powerful and flexible programming language for the musician who wants to easily compose and generate music on the fly, using naught but a text editor. Alda is designed in a way that equally favors aesthetics, flexibility and ease of use, with (eventual) support for the text-based creation of all manner of music: classical, popular, chiptune, electroacoustic, and more!

Etymology

Alda was originally named after Yggdrasil, the venerated tree of Norse legend which held aloft the mythical nine worlds. I thought it to be a fitting name, imagining the realm of sound/music to be an immense tree bearing numerous branches which could represent genres, tonalities, paradigms, etc.

By incredible coincidence, the company I work for uses Norse mythology as a theme for naming our software projects, and there will soon be a major one in production called Yggdrasil. To be completely honest, I was never totally happy with Yggdrasil as the name for my music programming language (it's a mouthful), so I took this as an opportunity to rename it. Alda is Quenya for "tree."

There is a plethora of music software out there, but most of these programs tend to specialize or "reside" in at most one or two different realms -- FamiTracker and MCK are specifically for the creation of NES music; puredata, Csound and ChucK are mostly useful for experimental electronic music; Lilypond, Rosegarden, and MuseScore can be used for more than just classical music, but their standard notation interface suggests a preference for classical music; Guitar Pro is targeted toward the creation of guitar-based music. Why not have one piece of software that can serve as the Great Tree that supports all of these existing worlds?

Syntax example

piano: o3
g8 a b > c d e f+ g | a b > c d e f+ g4
g8 f+ e d c < b a g | f+ e d c < b a g4
<< g1/>g/>g/b/>d/g

Quick demo

Assuming you have Boot installed, try this on for size:

git clone [email protected]:alda-lang/alda.git
cd alda
bin/alda play --file test/examples/awobmolg.alda

NOTE: The first time you run the play task, you may need to wait a minute for the FluidR3 MIDI soundfont dependency (~141 MB) to download. Alda uses this soundfont in order to make your JVM's MIDI instruments sound a lot nicer. If you'd prefer to skip this step and use your JVM's default soundfont instead, include the --stock flag (i.e. play --stock --file ...).

You can also execute arbitrary Alda code, like this:

bin/alda play --code "piano: c6 d12 e6 g12~4"

Installation

The executable file alda in the bin directory of this repository is a standalone executable script that can be run from anywhere. It will retrieve the latest release version of Alda and run it, passing along any command-line arguments you give it.

To install Alda, simply copy the alda script from this repo into any directory in your $PATH, e.g. /bin or /usr/local/bin:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alda-lang/alda/master/bin/alda -o /usr/local/bin/alda && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/alda

This script requires the Clojure build tool Boot, so you will need to have that installed as well. Mac OS X users with Homebrew can run brew install boot-clj to install Boot. Otherwise, see here for more details about installing Boot.

Once you've completed the steps above, you'll be able to run alda from any working directory. Running the command alda by itself will display the help text.

alda.lisp

Under the hood, Alda transforms input (i.e. Alda code) into Clojure code which, when evaluated, produces a map of score information, which the audio component of Alda can then use to make sound. This Clojure code is written in a DSL called alda.lisp. See below for an example of alda.lisp code and the result of evaluating it.

Parsing demo

You can use the parse task to parse Alda code into alda.lisp (-l/--lisp) and/or evaluate it to produce a map (-m/--map) of score information.

$ alda parse --lisp --map -f test/examples/hello_world.alda
(alda.lisp/score
  (alda.lisp/part {:names ["piano"]}
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :c)
                    (alda.lisp/duration (alda.lisp/note-length 8)))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :d))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :e))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :f))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :g))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :f))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :e))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :d))
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :c)
                    (alda.lisp/duration (alda.lisp/note-length 2 {:dots 1})))))

{:events #{#alda.lisp.Note{:offset 2000.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 261.6255653005986, :duration 1350.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 261.6255653005986, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 250.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 293.6647679174076, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 1250.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 349.2282314330039, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 750.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 349.2282314330039, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 1000.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 391.99543598174927, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 1750.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 293.6647679174076, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 1500.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 329.6275569128699, :duration 225.0} #alda.lisp.Note{:offset 500.0, :instrument "piano-VoUlp", :volume 1.0, :pitch 329.6275569128699, :duration 225.0}},
 :instruments {"piano-VoUlp" {:octave 4, :current-offset #alda.lisp.AbsoluteOffset{:offset 3500.0}, :config {:type :midi}, :duration 3N, :volume 1.0, :last-offset #alda.lisp.AbsoluteOffset{:offset 2000.0}, :id "piano-VoUlp", :quantization 0.9, :tempo 120, :panning 0.5, :current-marker :start, :stock "piano"}}}

$ alda parse --lisp -c 'cello: c+'
(alda.lisp/score
  (alda.lisp/part {:names ["cello"]}
    (alda.lisp/note (alda.lisp/pitch :c :sharp))))

Logging

Alda uses timbre for logging. Every note event, attribute change, etc. is logged at the DEBUG level, which is useful for, well, debugging, but can otherwise be a little distracting. You may want to set Timbre's logging level to WARN, so that you'll only see warnings and errors. You can do that by setting an environment variable:

export TIMBRE_LOG_LEVEL=warn

License

Copyright © 2012-2015 Dave Yarwood

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.