Interesting. How does it compare to e.g. Faust or the SuperCollider language? What's the "unique selling point" of Audion compared to other "music programming languages"?
Hi! sure, first of all its full stack / general, e.g. read a sensor, write a file, serve a request, trigger some videos or dim lights and query a database, just using builtins. All while sequencing instruments and interacting with a performer. Instead of providing timing and composition abstractions it’s completely open: threads are in sync so a for loop is the sequencer, a separate thread gives you more polyphony and timing is a primitive that is very easy to control and build an top of.
The integration with supercollider (SC) makes SC syntax somewhat simpler? That part may be somewhat opinionated however Audion does not need SC, if you have hardware or software instruments you can use that.
So I think in one phrase: A small language that is fun to write and lets you hack music.
I've discovered typst in the last year and used to build a resume and cover letter template that feeds from a YAML file.
After a bit of tinkering and understanding the idiosyncracies of Typst, the joy of having reliable, consistent, beautiful, data-driven resumes and cover letters is not measurable. It basically lifted any barrier to applications, while whatever I had before I had always considered a burden.
On top of that, I can add hiring process data directly to the yaml file to run further analysis.
Can LaTeX do this? Most probably, but the learning curve is the difference.
I have been using Typst for creating notes and it is an awesome tool. I use it to create notes on welding for my students. It makes my life so much easier compared to badsoft and its not-word-ing (you understand me).
Neither the whole L4 line of work, which fundamentally rely on synchronous, rendezvous-style IPC as their primary kernel-level communication primitive; the transition to synchronous IPC together with the specific way it was designed was absolutely central to the dramatic performance improvements of L4 over first-generation microkernels like Mach. QNX independently pioneered many of the concepts that define successful microkernels.
Complexity in music is a very ambiguous "measure". Look at e.g. Brubeck's "Take five", which many consider "complex" because of the unusual time signature; but it's actually a pretty simple piece. On the other hand, look at "minimal music" such as e.g. Steve Reich's "Music for 18 musicians"; it's based on just a few simple rules, but the resul is far from simple. When even the topic of a study is ambiguous, what can we expect from the results.
This is amazing. How long did it take you to implement it, i.e. reach that high level of Ansi test conformance? Have you been able to reuse concepts e.g. from ABCL?
Sounds nice, thanks. Do you also have experience in other live coding languages? Can you share your thoughts about advantages/disadvantages of Lisp compared to others?
Hey, thanks for taking a look! I have messed around with Clojure (Overtone) and Sonic Pi (Ruby dialect) and normally prefer lisps for anything fun :)
Regarding advantages/disadvantages, Lisp is always very terse which helps and with structural editing juggling parens becomes a non-issue. Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that.
I'm still not sure on which composition language to focus on. I definitely don't like languages where a lot of the syntax is "hidden" in strings (such as e.g. in Tidal). Lisp has aspects which fit to music intuitively, but as soon as you try to represent the full information expected by Midi the code gets messy. Interestingly, Common Music and Nyquist went away from Lisp towards SAL because composers apparently preferred a Pascal like infix syntax over the Lisp way.
I think macros can help when the syntax seems messy, that is where lisp shines the most. Have a look at extempore lang (https://extemporelang.github.io/) you might like it. Macros written by others can feel like magic, but a DSL you create might still feel the most intuitive. I get your point about hidden syntax though.
I'm aware of Extempore and its predecessor, but I think they pretty much have the same problem, with no elegant solution (at least I didn't see one when studying the docs and thesis). Maybe the trick is indeed - as you say - to implement a "sublanguage" with macros to cover the more complex music representation. Forth is an interesting language, but I think it has even more issues to represent musical information.
Popper explains that falsificationism is a methodological-philosophical proposal, what he calls "meta-science", and is therefore not subject to its own criterion; different domains of inquiry operate under different criteria of evaluation. Horgan's "Is falsification falsifiable?" question treats falsificationism as if it were itself an empirical claim, which is a category error.
> there is no better background music to code to than Steve Reich
Music for 18 Musicians is indeed very well suited; Bach works also very well for me. But not every piece of the said composers works equally well to support concentration.
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