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 guess Orca is also playing patterns, that's true. But it has a very understandable operation; you can easily follow at least the individual operator behaviour, if not the side effect on the whole thing. Something like this is more interesting:

swing([c d [e f]]).amp(.5 .9)

i.e. taking a pattern specification and applying a swing operator to the timing of the notes (here c,d are 1 beat, e, f are half a beat). and then applying a pair of amplitudes to the 'result' of that. There are different ways to think about what the result will be here, depending on how you spread the amplitude values over (time? note?). In an ideal world I'd be able to make a simple little pattern runtime that something like Ixi lang could sit on top of. At the moment I'm just trying to get a feel for the problem space....

this covers patterns in gibber and contains references/inspiration from earlier works (hsml, smoke): http://www.charlie-roberts.com/pubs/gibber_music_2015_ICMC.pdf

Great stuff @Charlie Roberts - thanks!

I'm not quite sure I understand how you're using the word pattern here, but the first thing I thought of based on your description is the Newscool Reaktor ensemble, which uses Conway's Game of Life as the pattern source for the sequencer (I haven't watched this video, but seems to give the idea)

@robenkleene That is a really interesting system (Newscool). Thanks for the other references too. I believe that Orca has a Euclidean operator, though I haven't used it.

perhaps relevant: XronoMorph, an app for the visual and geometrical exploration and construction of rhythms http://www.dynamictonality.com/xronomorph.htm

Thanks @Emmanuel Oga There are some good references on that page too

This demo of livecoding WebAudio from scratch using a FORTH REPL by Karsten Schmidt has some stack-based pattern ideas. More: https://github.com/thi-ng/charlie#readme

nice topic! there's an old review of pattern dsls in slab.org/thesis

Thanks Alex, I attended a workshop Alex did at the weekend; don't think I've seen this paper.

Heh yes I probably am 😉 I'd forgotten about this slack/thread.. I made a forum for discussing algorithmic patterns if you're interested https://alpaca.lurk.org/