Here's one of my more interesting music+programming projects — http://ivanish.ca/diminished-fifth/ — Written in ClojureScript using the Web Audio API. It's an attempt to make music where the BPM is non-constant, and you have layers of melody/rhythm happening at

BPM*2^n

multiples, where

n

varies well into the negative and positive. It starts out deterministic, and gradually deviates from that, exploring the parameter space. It takes a few minutes to warm up, and you will have heard 90% of the meaningful parameter space after 30 minutes or an hour, though there are enough prime numbers involved that it'd probably take a few years to hear it truly repeat itself. (In fact, an earlier version of this project ran continuously for one year in a public space in Calgary, as an installation. The complaints were pretty delightful.)

Here’s my list of VCV Rack plugins (https://vcvrack.com/plugins.html) that use some kind of programming-ish approach: https://github.com/Rcomian/jsfx-vcv - Reaper JSFX language embedded https://github.com/david-c14/Torpedo - a “modem device” 😮 https://github.com/bokontep/BokontepByteBeatMachine - JS bytecode https://github.com/FrankBuss/Formula - fork of above https://github.com/freddyz/computerscare-vcv-modules - crazy madness

hi! not related with FoC but it does with music, I've been playing with orca and I don't have midi hardware, I tried using supercollider to have sound and I couldn't set it up, so I ended up using sunvox, the thing is that the default sounds that the sunvox examples have are not what I would like, does someone know of any free software I can use to get one of these sounds from my laptop: Roland TR-808 or the bass from future islands and the drums from joy division (yes, pretty specific 😄)

This week's code & coffee focus is on getting my little synth up and running so I can hook it into Orca & my live coding tool. The lisp syntax is just an example of what I'm going for (the graph is currently hooked up in code using a similar set of api calls); I'm not sure on the best approach yet. I've looked at 'Fe' as a simpler language I can play with more (currently I embed Chibi Scheme). The synth is just a directed graph, but initially I want to just show a sensibly ordered list of nodes with buttons on them. The live code workflow is something like: • Declare synth in code • Tweak synth through easy UI • Declare patterns/whatever in code to drive it, or use Orca.

do yall know any sources for public domain (CC0) music? Not even noncommercial but straight up no attribution public domain?

If anyone is interested in learning real-time audio programming: The Centre for Digital Music Masters of Science module on real-time DSP programming in C++ has been ported to YouTube for free and launched today:  I can assure that it's extremely high quality content, as it's delivered by my PhD supervisor instrumentslab.org

The course is based on bela.io

Nice little dump of my synthesizer project - setup to generate many notes on many different synthesizer graphs. Each row is a different worker thread, and the blue bar is the total duration of the audio callback thread. I still have lots of optimizations to try, but this is just a first step to ensure I can do this without issues. Some of this work is actually unnecessary too; the small blocks tacked on the end are the FFT for visualization. They can be pushed out until just before the thread returns, so they don't take away audio processing cycles.

There are several music languages that I know of which create music using patterns. They are: • FoxDot (Python) • Extempore - the recent pattern additions (Scheme) • TidalCycles (Haskell). There are references in the docs to Reactive Programming • IxiLang (SCLang) I'm researching pattern languages and their implementations. In particular how patterns are managed/looped/mutated. If anyone has interesting/useful sources, I'd be keen to know. Both languages I haven't thought of and general pattern management systems......

I've been thinking about why we still use absolute pitch relationships so much when describing music. It seems to me it would be more productive to talk about intervals, so instead of, say, C - E - G, we could talk about, say, 1 - 3 - 5, or whatever convention used to talk about intervals on a regular music scale. Not that notations like these are not already used, for instance I love the approach used in hookpad, and I want to learn more about roman numeral analysis. I recently learn about the Nashville numeral system too. Both these systems make a lot of sense to me.... And yet, even modern scoring tools like extempore keep using absolute intervals to notate music. For instance, for that extempore "clip" I was expecting to find, say, something like:

(play `((5 _ 5) (3 _ 5) (_ _ 0) (3 _ 0)) `(#base 55))

as opposed to just:

(play `((60 _ 60) (58 _ 60) (_ _ 55) (58 _ 55)))

A lot of the ordeal of learning how music works is about dealing (often through sheer memorization and "force of will" 😛 ) the explosion of combinations having to deal with asymmetry when it comes to perform certain patterns of note on actual instruments (Major scale, Minor scale, etc). In this regard I find isomorphic instruments very interesting as a solution to this complexity. I also feel like a notation like Dodeka is a step in the right direction.

Might be a repost but devine just uploaded

fascinating video essay on music notation software

I've been playing with a new DAW and I gotta say, music production is still infuriatingly complicated. I'm using Native Instruments Kontakt and Bitwig in this particular instance. I need to "route" some notes connected from various tracks in Bitwig to a VST virtual instrument. I managed to make it work in 3 or 4 different ways, all of them requiring clicking through 3px-10px wide GUI controls (Kontakt doesn't support GUI scaling and everything is super small...). Things are hidden behind a trail of clicks in buttons, drop downs and select boxes ... frustation level: Lenny Kravitz's scarf.

Looking at alternative music notation again ... a bit of a rabbit hole. I was excited about dodeka but after actually trying to use it and staring at it for a while I find that it lacks redundancy, everything looks like a floating rectangle. KlavarScore looks good for piano playing. Found a small proposal (https://fastgram.org/) that both augments and simplifies traditional notation to good effect, I think. For guitar found this "brenna method" which uses color and shapes to add circle-of-fifths information to the fretboard. I feel like a combination of these elements could be fused together for a visualization that could help play and understand music in different instruments.

Just found about https://www.nime.org/

Despite the click-bait/culture war title, this video is quite good: ... and everything it has to say about music theory also applies to our default notational conventions. (I would add, perhaps controversially, that most of the same things are true of our mathematical notation.)

As mentioned in #linking-together, MIT have opened access to all of their journal archives. People interested in computer music might particularly want to have a look at the Computer Music Journal and Leonardo Music Journal: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/lmj

love this: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2013/hip-hop-transcriptions/ pretty nice (seems obvious after you see it!) idea for a way to combine time box units with standard notation

Nestup is an experimental markup language for musical rhythms. It's specifically designed to break away from a fixed musical grid. The name is a contraction of nested tuplets, which are hard to program on a piano roll but easy to notate with Nestup. https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

https://xenpaper.com/ xenpaper Text-based microtonal sequencer. Write down musical ideas and share the link around.

https://sol-hsa.itch.io/sassy A modular synthesizer as a spreadsheet. Neat.

This is pretty cool https://ludotune.com/

I'm still lurking, and still playing with music & live coding stuff. I've just been a bit busy lately. Part of my current effort is to try to make a combination note and text editor view for sheet music. I think there is interesting potential here to have a 2-way text->music representation that can be edited both as a simple stream of text tokens, and as visual notes. ... but for now I'm working on the complex issue of drawing musical notes and converting from a stream of tokens representing the music. If you've seen my previous work, you'll know one of my interests is closing the gap between the live-coded music and the expectation of how it will sound.

❤️ this: https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1494393714164174856?s=12

Anyone at NAMM? Let's meet and talk about Lamdu and your projects. Most of the time you could find me manning or hanging around the Sound Radix booth.

I recently made my audio components into a module; handles setting up audio, doing FFT, connecting to Ableton link, reading and playing midi. There's a video: https://github.com/rezonality/Zing

Jimmy Webb is one of the top songwriters of my generation. We are truly lucky to have a recording of an interview of Jimmy Webb done by someone who has a clue and had the balls to stump up his own money to make it happen. Why should you care? Quantization is not the only way to deep dive into a subject. Developing theories about monads will never help you create content as good as what Jimmy Webb created. No type-checked language is ever going to touch as many humans as “The Witchitaw Lineman”. An interesting question is “Why?“. I think that Raskin’s “The Humane Interface” was just beginning to scratch the surface of this question, along with Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”. In songwriting, there is the concept of “co-writing”. 1+1=3. The best creations come from teams of people with complementary skills. Everybody in the room gets an equal cut. Isolationist songwriters sometimes succeed, but co-writing teams succeed more often.

I discovered Philip Glass by chance, signing out "glassworks" cd from library based off album art. At the time I was coming off of listening to overtly technical music like prog, metal etc. I was tired of self-indulgent guitars & meandering song structures that never end, and then I found philip glass who created textures I could have never imagined with use of very simple melodic loops & rhythms that when layered ontop of each other created the most rich, beautiful & outer-worldly music. On a personal note, his career is also extremely inspiring as someone who didn't reach mainstream success until well into his 40s (and IMO his best work started then), and still making music now late into his 80s. I had a go at music in my early 20s and got burnt out, but knowing I have time to enrich & progress as a creative is a very warm feeling.