I would like to announce the Mondrian Project.
Mondrian is an attempt
to create a text-based setting for writing and performing music.
That's great!
It's like a more traditional musically informed version of what I've been
playing with for live performance for the last year or two. I've been
wondering why there hasn't been more work in this area, text seems the
perfect tool for macro based pattern building for melodies and such like.
The way I do it (see
http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=LsystemComposition and
http://www.pawfal.org/patterncascade/ for some recordings) is to have
single character for musical instructions ('o' for a note, '.' for a
rest,
'+' pitch up, '-' pitch down, '/' and '\' for panning etc)
and I use
iterative search/replace with tokens to represent different melody
fragments (using an l system rule based approach).
I've found that this is usable in realtime, it's great to copy/paste
melodies and modify them live in a text editor to build up complex
structures. I've also found you can mutate the melodies' rules and evolve
them with a genetic interface for some really rapid changes.
Oh yeah, and I've just released an online version of the genetic selection
interface part too:
http://www.pawfal.org/Software/livenoisetools/noisepatternlet/
:)
cheers,
dave