Dave Yarwood - A music composition language with a functional backbone - Compose Melbourne 2018

A music composition language with a functional backbone #dave_yarwood Alda is a music programming language that offers a way to describe a musical composition in the form of a text document. The language has an easy-to-use syntax that is well-suited for both musicians with little-to-no programming knowledge and programmers with little-to-no music theory knowledge. Alda is inspired by existing music/audio programming languages such as MML, LilyPond and ChucK, but aspires to be a general-purpose music programming language that gives composers the power to create music in many different ways, all while maintaining simplicity and ease of use. In this presentation, I will give a brief introduction to Alda and its purpose. I will provide a lightning-fast tutorial, demonstrating the basic features of the language, accompanied by live audio from Alda’s “Read-Evaluate-Play-Loop“ (REPL). As I type each snippet of Alda code into the REPL, the audience will hear