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                                    ~ alda ~

A music programming language for musicians

Installation | Docs | Changelog | Contributing

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New to Alda? You may be interested in reading this blog post as an introduction.

Inspired by other music/audio programming languages such as PPMCK, LilyPond and ChucK, Alda aims to be a powerful and flexible programming language for the musician who wants to easily compose and generate music on the fly, using naught but a text editor. Alda is designed in a way that equally favors aesthetics, flexibility and ease of use, with (eventual) support for the text-based creation of all manner of music: classical, popular, chiptune, electroacoustic, and more!

Features

• Easy to understand, markup-like syntax
• Perfect for musicians who don't know how to program and programmers who don't know how to music
• Represent scores as text files and play them back with the alda command-line tool
• Interactive REPL lets you type Alda code and hear the results in real time
• Underlying Clojure DSL allows you to use Alda directly in your Clojure project.
• Inline Clojure code allows you to hack the Gibson and write scores programmatically
• Create MIDI music using any of the instruments in the General MIDI Sound Set

TODO

• Define and use waveform synthesis instruments
• Import MIDI files
• Export to MusicXML for inter-operability with other music software
• A more robust REPL, tailor-made for editing scores interactively
• A plugin system allowing users to define custom/unofficial syntax in Alda scores
• An "alda daemon" with server/client semantics

If you're a developer and you'd like to help, come on in -- the water's fine!

Syntax example

piano: o3
g8 a b > c d e f+ g | a b > c d e f+ g4
g8 f+ e d c < b a g | f+ e d c < b a g4
<< g1/>g/>g/b/>d/g

For more examples, see these example scores.

Quick Start

Installation

More information can be found in the docs.

Mac OS X / Linux

1. Install Boot.

2. Run this command to place the alda script in your $PATH:

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alda-lang/alda/master/bin/alda -o /usr/local/bin/alda && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/alda
   

Windows

See the docs.

Editor Plugins

For the best experience when editing Alda score files, install the Alda file-type plugin for your editor of choice.

Demo

NOTE: The first time you run one of these tasks, you may need to wait a minute for the FluidR3 MIDI soundfont dependency (~141 MB) to download. Alda uses this soundfont in order to make your JVM's MIDI instruments sound a lot nicer. If you'd prefer to skip this step and use your JVM's default soundfont instead, include the --stock flag (i.e. play --stock --file ...).

To play a file:

alda play --file examples/bach_cello_suite_no_1.alda

To play arbitrary code:

alda play --code "piano: c6 d12 e6 g12~4"

To start an Alda REPL:

alda repl

Documentation

Alda's documentation can be found here.

Contributing

PRs welcome! See: CONTRIBUTING.md

👏 👏 👏 A big shout-out to our contributors! 👏 👏 👏

Support, Discussion, Comaraderie

Sign up to the universe of Clojure chat @ http://clojurians.net/, then join us on #alda

License

Copyright © 2012-2015 Dave Yarwood et al

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.