Earlier today I was thinking about Mithen’s “The Singing Neanderthals,” and how deeply embedded in the human brain musical constructs are. Does anyone know of programming systems (particularly end-user programming systems) that use music as the programming interface, or perhaps a significant part of it?

[moved from top level, originally by @Eric Gade] A crude example here would be, say, making a loop using a kind of melody or something (though maybe a musical programming environment has no need for loops, or maybe it calls them codas, or whatever)

I don't know anything in this vein, but as a musician and lover of games like Ocarina of Time and DDR/Guitar Hero/Before the Echo (nee Sequence), I've sometimes thought about it. I think music-as-programming has more of a home in video games than general programming, because the great difficulty seem to me to be the invention (and comprehension!) of grammars that map musical feature to semantic behavior. The only method I've seen is essentially a complex keyboard shortcut: a specific sequence maps to a specific function, like the song fragments in Ocarina of Time or the spells in Before the Echo. It's easy to imagine something like musical brainf*ck, or maybe a slightly more sophisticated macro system where the user develops a mapping of musical structure to program structure (e.g., this chord represents this variable; this melodic fragment following this chord represents this method call), but that's just regular programming with extra steps. Could be run to write a program that you can then perform, though, or to generate mappings aleatorically and use small programs as sight-reading material--or if you really hate yourself, write a JIT compiler that makes random mistakes when you do, so you have to perform the program perfectly to get it to compile correctly. These are all esoteric use cases, though. But consider the limited expressivity of a musical language, like the hmmmmm system described in the link. This is why I think music + video games is a good combination. Imagine the grammar is provided and structures map to interesting behaviors--running, jumping, dashing, guarding, rolling, targeting enemies, attacking, casting spells--a musical interface could be a fun way of "programming" the world, or at least of improvisationally triggering simple scripts written in a user-friendly language. I like to imagine Hollow Knight-esque boss fights where the "score" of the fight is a set of musical+visual telegraphs that tell you what the boss is about to do, and your job as the player is to respond with an appropriate musical phrase (dodge/guard/attack). The record of the fight becomes a piece of music written as a structured improvisation between a computer and a human within the rules provided by the game developer/composer. But these are just pipe dreams. Like I said, I haven't seen music in programming systems, and for the difficulties of grammar, I don't think we're likely to.

@Cameron King Have you played patapon?

@S.M Mukarram Nainar. No, I haven't heard of it before now. It look pretty cool, and very similar to what I've imagined, if a little lacking in musical complexity.