27 Dec
2025
27 Dec
'25
1:38 a.m.
Ah, thanks! Long list.
I think I remember ABC. The very first cell phones we bought let you
input ABC and use them as ring tones. Surprisingly capable for phones
limited to text-only input with no way to play any other audio formats.
I've considered finding various ways to combine pi, e (natural
logarithm) and other irrational mathematical numbers into music. Right
now, it's all manual. But if it could be done programmatically, it might
be more fun. At least faster.
Ages ago, I programmed in Commodore BASIC, FORTH, Postscript (yes, it is
a full Turing-complete language!), XML/XSLT, and Wordperfect Office
macro language (competitor to MS Office VisualBasic). I used to be able
to read C and C++ but have never programmed in them.
Any advice?
On 12/25/25 08:39, MS lists wrote:
Oh, thank you, David, for bringing this up. Looking at
this very long
list, I figured, why not make a list of languages/libraries I have
actually used. Here it is:
- ABC
- ChucK
- CLM
- CMN
- Common Music
- CSound
- CYBIL
- FAUST
- HMSL
- IanniX
- KeyKit
- Lilypond
- Max/MSP
- Nyquist
- OpenMusic
- PureData
- snd
- SuperCollider
Some of them I only dabbled with, others I've used extensively.
Also, not present in the list:
- InScore - not really a programming language but enables dynamic
music scores consisting of multimedia representations (image, video,
music notation etc), completely driven by OSC (Open Sound Control)
- guido - Music markup language (akin to Lilypond and ABC) that
handles the music notation for InScore above
And since that list contains also specialized libraries for some
programming languages, I would add:
- pyo (DSP for python)
- Music21 (music analysis and (re)composition for Python)
And in case you haven't noticed, Tim Thompson, who compiled this list
of computer languages for music, is also the author of KeyKit.
Joyful and healthy holidays for everyone!
Michał
On Thursday, December 25th, 2025 at 02:12, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com>
wrote:
--
David W. Jones
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com
"My password is the last 8 digits of π."
I found this on Mastodon:
https://musician.social/users/elsemusic/statuses/115764769354069738
An extensive dictionary of the languages used for programming music.
https://timthompson.com/plum/cgi/showlist.cgi?sort=name&concise=yes
An example:
'Nyquist: A functional programming language for composition and sound
synthesis. Uses a Lisp syntax, a signal processing and signal
representation core, and a rich semantics dealing with time and
transformations.'
Which ones have you used, if any?
--
David W. Jones
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com
"My password is the last 8 digits of π."