Alda is designed to be easy to learn and use, even for those who have little to no programming experience. The language is deliberately simple, omitting the complex features that you see in most programming languages, like functions, classes, and types.
For example, a C major scale played on an acoustic guitar in eighth notes, starting on C3 (that's the note C in octave number 3) is written like this:
acoustic-guitar:
o3 c8 d e f g a b > c
At the same time, an important goal of Alda is to facilitate writing music programmatically. You can get a lot of mileage out of the Alda language alone, but if you happen to have a little bit of programming knowledge, you can go beyond thinking of Alda as a language and start to think of it as a platform for algorithmic composition and live coding.
Simply put, algorithmic composition is when you write music in a way that leaves some part of the process up to chance. Which parts are left up to chance, and how exactly the "chance" parts are implemented, is entirely open-ended.
For example, you could write a piece of music where you come up with a set of rhythms, as well as a set of pitches, and then you write a computer program that puts together random combinations of the rhythms and pitches to create a piece of music.
Another example: you could write a program that fetches the 10-day weather forecast for your area and uses some arbitrary rules to convert it into music. For instance, maybe if the temperature is an odd number, a major scale will be used; or maybe if the forecast calls for snow, one of the instruments will be a cello; etc.
The possibilities are endless!
Live coding is the practice of creating music (or other types of art) on the fly, in a live performance setting, by programming.
Oftentimes, the performance will include a projection of the programmer's screen, so that the audience can watch the code being written and evaluated and observe the art being created in real time.
As mentioned above, Alda the language does not provide facilities like functions and random number generators that one would ordinarily use to write algorithmic compositions.
However, the benefit of Alda's simplicity is that it can easily be used as a foundation for more complex things.
The libraries below can be used to generate Alda code by writing a program in another language. This technique is especially powerful when the language is one that allows you to program interactively, e.g. in a REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print Loop).
If your favorite programming language is not listed here and you're interested in using it to generate Alda scores, please consider writing your own Alda live-coding library in that language and adding it to this list. It's surprisingly easy!
| Language | Library | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Clojure | alda-clj | Dave Yarwood |
| Ruby | alda-rb | Ulysses Zhan |
| Julia | Alda.jl | Ismael Venegas |
| Python | alda-python | Nicola Vitucci |