techscientist / alda

A music programming language for musicians. :notes:

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                                               ~ alda ~

a music programming language for musicians

Installation | Docs | Changelog | Contributing

( )

New to Alda? You may be interested in reading this blog post as an introduction.

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!

Features

• Easy to understand, markup-like syntax
• Perfect for musicians who don't know how to program and programmers who don't know how to music
• Represent scores as text files and play them back with the alda command-line tool
• Interactive REPL lets you type Alda code and hear the results in real time
• Underlying Clojure DSL allows you to use Alda directly in your Clojure project.
• Inline Clojure code allows you to hack the Gibson and write scores programmatically
• Create MIDI music using any of the instruments in the General MIDI Sound Set

TODO

• Define and use waveform synthesis instruments
• Import MIDI files
• Export to MusicXML for inter-operability with other music software
• A more robust REPL, tailor-made for editing scores interactively
• A plugin system allowing users to define custom/unofficial syntax in Alda scores

If you're a developer and you'd like to help, come on in -- the water's fine!

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

For more examples, see these example scores.

Installation

You must have Java 7+ installed on your system in order to run Alda.

(Chances are, you already have a recent enough version of Java installed.)

Mac OS X / Linux

• Go to the latest release page and download alda.

• Make the file executable:

    chmod +x alda
  

• Make alda available on your $PATH:

  Using /usr/local/bin here as an example; you can use any directory on your $PATH.

  mv alda /usr/local/bin
  

Windows

• Go to the latest release page and download alda.exe.

• Make the alda command available by moving alda.exe to your system root path:

    C:\> move alda.exe %SystemRoot%
  

Updating Alda

Once you have Alda installed, you can update to the latest version at any time by running:

alda update

MIDI soundfonts

Default JVM soundfonts usually are of low quality. We recommend installing a good freeware soundfont like FluidR3 to make your MIDI instruments sound a lot nicer. For your convenience, there is a script in this repo that will install the FluidR3 soundfont for Mac and Linux users.

If you're a Windows user and you know how to install a MIDI soundfont to the Java Virtual Machine, please let us know!

To install FluidR3 on your Mac or Linux system, clone this repo and run:

scripts/install-fluidr3

This will download FluidR3 and replace ~/.gervill/soundbank-emg.sf2 (your JVM's default soundfont) with it.

Editor Plugins

For the best experience when editing Alda score files, install the Alda file-type plugin for your editor of choice.

Don't see a plugin for your favorite editor? Write your own and open a Pull Request to add it here! :)

• Sublime Text
• Atom
• Vim
• Emacs

Demo

To play a file:

alda play --file examples/bach_cello_suite_no_1.alda

To play arbitrary code:

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

To start an Alda REPL:

alda repl

Documentation

Alda's documentation can be found here.

Contributing

PRs welcome! See: CONTRIBUTING.md

👏 👏 👏 A big shout-out to our contributors! 👏 👏 👏

Support, Discussion, Comaraderie

Slack: Sign up to the universe of Clojure chat @ http://clojurians.net/, then join us on #alda

Reddit: Come join us in /r/alda, where you can discuss all things Alda and share your Alda scores!

License

Copyright © 2012-2016 Dave Yarwood et al

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.