Languages used for programming music

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david

25 Dec 2025 25 Dec '25

8:12 a.m.

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."

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Lorenzo Miniero

25 Dec 25 Dec

8:30 a.m.

I've only ever used Lilypond myself, which I really love (I still use it to quickly write down ideas) but that may arguably be more tailored towards beautiful sheet music, rather than actually programming music. If the BASIC music commands in my old MSX from the 80s counts, then I used those too :-D Lorenzo Il gio 25 dic 2025, 08:12 david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> ha scritto:

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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. Jonesgnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, communityhttp://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π." _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list -- linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org To unsubscribe send an email to linux-audio-user-leave(a)lists.linuxaudio.org

Christopher Arndt

9:56 a.m.

Am 25.12.25 um 08:12 schrieb david:

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Which ones have you used, if any?

* ABC (my favourite notation language, at least for non-orchestral music) * Chuck - liked it, but found it lacking features I wanted * FAUST (my DSP programming language of choice nowadays) * Lilypond - never used it extensively, but when I write my first symphony, I will ;-) * Pure data - powerful, not my cup of tea, I like text-based programming * MusicXML - not really a programming / notation language, but an exchange format, imo. - JSFX, Snd, STK, SuperCollider Merry Christmas Chris

MS lists

7:39 p.m.

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:

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david

27 Dec 27 Dec

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:

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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."

MS lists

5:50 p.m.

On Friday, December 26th, 2025 at 19:39, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

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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. (...) Any advice?

If by "combining numbers into music" you mean obtaining symbolic representation of music (i.e. score that you will give to musicians, MIDI, etc.), Python might be a low-hanging fruit. There are many modules for all kinds of scientific computing and visualization, Music21 is made for handling musical structures on any level and can export to MIDI, MusicXML, Lilypond, and probably other formats. The language is "easy" to learn and there are tons of resources for learning and growing. You could probably even do the maths in a spreadsheet of your choice and use Python + Music21 only to convert your CSV file to a score. For explorations on the level of sound synthesis or DSP, you'll probably want to look into SuperCollider, FAUST or CSound, the choice will be hard to make. Nyquist (Lisp syntax) is part of Audacity, so that might be one possible path.

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Postscript (yes, it is a full Turing-complete language!),

So is PowerPoint :P Cheers, Michał

Will Godfrey

9:32 a.m.

On Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:12:08 -1000 david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

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very many years ago there was AMPLE written for the BBC computer Music 500 - 5000 add-on modules. Unfortunately I think it was tied specifically to that hardware, and has long since disappeared. -- Will J Godfrey {apparently no longer an 'elderly', now a 'senior'. Is that promotion?} https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/ http://yoshimi.github.io Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

Adam Sampson

12:06 p.m.

Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> writes:

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very many years ago there was AMPLE written for the BBC computer Music 500 - 5000 add-on modules. Unfortunately I think it was tied specifically to that hardware, and has long since disappeared.

AMPLE and the other Music 500 software is very usable in emulation - most of the decent BBC emulators (B-Em, BeebEm, MAME) have an implementation of the Music 500 hardware. It's a clever design, a microcoded wavetable synth built with very minimal hardware using a logarithmic sample representation: http://www.colinfraser.com/m5000/m5-eti.htm From a more modern perspective, it's a pity that it doesn't have filters and the wavetables are very small, but the large number of channels and support for stereo panning can make for some pretty impressive results in the hands of a skilled user... -- Adam Sampson <ats(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

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Adam Sampson
Christopher Arndt
david
Lorenzo Miniero
MS lists
Will Godfrey