Opusmodus: Common Lisp Music Composition System
opusmodus.com
opusmodus.com
[0]: http://impromptu.moso.com.au/index.html
https://github.com/openmusic-project/openmusic/releases/tag/...
LispWorks is 'relatively' popular for Lisp-based music applications like Open Music, om#, Scorecloud, OpusModus and a few others, because the native GUI toolkit for Windows, Linux and macOS allows to write portable GUI applications. One pays for being able to use a niche language able to write such applications.
https://iainctduncan.github.io/papers/design.html#why-use-a-...
s7 is by Bill Schottstaedt, one of the godfathers of computer music and the author of Common Lisp Music and the Snd editor. It has really nice design decisions for the composer-programmer.
https://iainctduncan.github.io/papers/design.html#why-use-a-...
Maybe anyone has experience why Opusmodus would be preferable to the ones listed?
I am still working on the composition system, together with many other stuff
here is an example of Kraftwerk:
They all do: Faust, Impromptu, ChuCK, csound, SuperCollider, etc., etc. I suppose that by itself should convince me that there's no other way (there are things like Orca, but I'm thinking of things that look more like conventional programming languages).
I seldom think about numbers when I'm programming a synthesizer -- I just turn this knob more this way or this slider down a bit. Why can't a music programming language be more . . . gestural? Not sure what the right word is. I want the benefits of a textual programming language, but I don't really want to have to start thinking about sound waves in terms of literal numeric frequencies, particular since I really don't do that while doing sound design.
I don't meant to pick on your project in particular; it looks really cool. But since you're writing one of these, perhaps you can answer my question. Why do these languages ask synth programmers to think in terms of precise numbers when programming an "actual" synth isn't really like that at all?
Try evaluating `d1 $ s "bd sn"` to get a bass drum-snare drum rhythm going. Then `d1 $ s "bd*2 sn"` to kick the bass drum twice each loop instead of once. It can be extremely intuitive.
scale(scales)
.scaleTranspose("[0 <2 4>]*2")
.struct("x*4")
.velocity("<.8 .5>\*4")
.velocity(0.8)
.slow(2)
)
.fast(1)
.note()
.clip("<.4 .8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2>/8")That's a bit of a contradiction. It's exactly the reason to use a programming language to have that level of control over signal processing. Otherwise you're better off with a tool like Reactor or VCV Rack.
https://100r.co/site/orca.html
Esoteric visual music programming language that uses a 2D grid of operators.
If you really want a gestural interface you can add it to any language that supports for MIDI control, or some other hardware connection option. (UDP, etc.)
The gestural part is trivial, just as putting a knob on a synth is trivial. The hard part is getting the knob to do something,. Which is not trivial at all.
In fact it's impossible without using numbers somewhere in the make-it-work chain. They may be a few levels down, but they're always going to be there.
Let's talk about LaTeX this way. Suppose LaTeX required everything to be specified in explicitly numeric terms. I find this sort of tedious, and I start asking why we can't just express the idea that things be "centered," or "justified," or "kerned" or "Large(r)," or "ragged right."
Would you really say that I am speaking in terms of contradictions? That what I really need is Word, that I must not understand the difference between a textual language and a gestural one, and that the only reason to use a textual language is precisely so that I can have precise control over these matters?
What I'm really asking here is whether we are really talking about the hard limits of programming languages, or if we are instead talking about a certain lack of imagination among programming language designers in this space?
let CENTERED = 0; let JUSTIFIED = 1;
Such a higher level macro system must make tradeoffs between sufficient control and conciseness (though its typically possible to insert low level code in between the macros since before any macro can be executed, rendered etc. it must be converted to the lower level anyway).
Developing such a system is probably a task for tech-savvy musician rather than a music-savvy techie. Its value proposition would be precisely to crystallize composition "invariants" that are expressive and versatile enough to enable people to compose genuinely new things.
But you should keep in mind that all LaTeX papers look a bit alike :-) (though much better than Word papers).
As math fields go, trig is fairly easy. The part you need to understand for music is a nicely-delimited chunk that you can learn quickly. I find it very rewarding as a way to think about music; you might too.
(I'm not talking about Fourier transforms; just basic trig.)
I would say live coding opens many possibilities, for example this one:
```
a: sin 440 >> mul 0.1
b: sin 441 >> mul 0.1
```
and you can use a loop to create 100 sine oscillators with random frequency
it's totally different from a physical synth
also there are tons of variation in terms of "patterns" for sequencing
just a unique feeling
You'll still need some for `sleep` (or `play_pattern_timed`), but if we're being pedantic about it, note lengths are already numbers as is.
OpusMondi is one of these. Others include my project (Scheme for Max, mentioned elsewhere at top level of the thread), Common Music, OpenMusic, etc.
Visual options include Max and Pd, which have an entire message/event layer that does not have to be used for digital audio at all.
All of these can output to standard synthesizers if the digital sound part is not your interest.
(Music notation might not have explicit numbers but it's got stand-ins for them.)
This syntax is also deeply integrated with the customised audio engine under the hood. And this audio engine can be used as an independent Rust audio library.
You can also use Glicol's DSL in Rust projects.
There are many use cases in this YouTube channel, such as Glicol running on Bela, functioning as a VST, and as a CLI tool:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT4REhRBWaOOrLQxCg5Uw97gE...
But all in all, I just feel comfortable coding with it for experimenting sound design and improvisation.
I wonder what is the dynamic behind that longevity. Music hasn't changed ofcourse but on tech side I would think there are significant new possibilities.
Is it something related to the difficulty of implementing low level algorithms (famously a lot of linear algebra stuff goes back decades and rests on C / Fortran libraries). Is it that there isn't enough interest to justify new efforts or are those systems already near "perfection"?
Some indeed started long ago; e.g. Common Music had its roots in the eighties and became a pretty popular composition environment during the nineties; in 2008 there was even a fundamental redesign and it's still developed. But there was also a certain abundance of new tools; many were released that essentially had the same goal and offered the same features, just implemented a little differently.
> Music hasn't changed ofcourse
Music and the way music is composed, produced and consumed has changed tremendously over the years, and so have the tools. In the past the focus was on algorithmic composition, and tools allowed to extend the possibilities of a composer also to sound design, but it took years until computers were fast enough to render a composition in real-time. Then came the time of the DAW's when eventually everyone could produce music with little investments. In the last ten years live coding became popular which is yet another way of composing and producing music, with new requirements for interactivity and ergonomic efficiency of the tools, and yet a different view of the composer and the composition process.
I discuss this a bit here: https://iainctduncan.github.io/papers/introduction.html
What's the topic of your PhD? Who is your supervisor?
My PhD is an interdisciplinary between music and CS, working with George Tzanetakis and Andy Schloss at University of Victoria in BC Canada, continuing the same work I did for the Masters. So that is Scheme for Max and other Scheme related music work, targeting algorithmic composition, mainstream production, and live coding contexts. Some of the current initiatives include a browser based Scheme algorithmic music system (not yet published, but using a WASM C++ worker for a sample-based scheduler), further work on s4m, s4pd, and Ableton Live tools, integrations with Csound (I wrote the csound6~ port for Max), likely a standalone host (similar to Grace), an object system and score tool, and some actual music!
(EDIT: I was wrong and thinking Nyquist, not SAL!)
SAL was designed and published in 2008 by Rick Taube; the present implementations are transpilers to Scheme or XLisp, but SAL is quite different from both Scheme and Lisp (in syntax and semantics).
> My PhD is...
Sounds interesting; but what is the actual research focus (besides the programming work and tool implementation)?
My PhD is interdisciplinary, so it is not a pure research CS - it's a combination of CS work, project work, and music composition & performance. The research side will be into how Scheme and recent developments in the Scheme side of PLT can be used in modern machines/environments for exploring algorithimic composition and live-coded composition and improvisation.
Lisp and Scheme are indeed very flexible to represent about anything, but on a very fundamental and general purpose level; of course you can do some kind of "DSL" with macros, but it's still "Lispy". SAL has less degrees of freedom and helps users not to get lost or bogged down, but it's still a general purpose programming language, not a specification system covering the essence of musical structures and processes.
> My PhD is interdisciplinary, so it is not a pure research CS..
Here in Switzerland "interdisciplinary" means that the research topics concern more than one research area, not that it's not pure research. Usually the PhD students are more challenged than with a "traditional" PhD, because there are more professors involved, each with his own research focus, that is most important to him (so it happens that the student does actually work for more than one PhD).
Concerning Scheme, depending on how big the "composition" is and whether it does sound generation and has to be controlled in real-time, a traditional byte-code interpreter will likely get to its limits, even on present HW.
But as far as practical use goes, I run 16 algorithmic sequencers implemented completely in s7 in real-time, inside Ableton Live, at an output latency of 8ms, and do so for long enough for compositions. This is while Live does a ton of software synthesis and FX dsp too, and all of the sequencers can be altered on the fly without audio dropouts! This is on the cheapest M1 you can get too. So it's absolutely practical for real time work. This is also without even a ton of attention to real-time GC in s7 - I haven't dug into that yet, but Bill has told me that while he did a lot of work to make it fast, it doesn't use an implementation specifically targeted at lowest possible pause times.
Whether the tradeoffs of Scheme vs other options are worth it for a particular composer/producer/performer varies of course, but it really is time to put to rest the notion that we can't run a Scheme interpreter for real-time music generation.
Well, it's not that I have anything against blinking cursors, nor I'm trying to infringe on their rights. Rather, it is that seeing the cursors blinking kind of freezes my brain. I simply cannot code if the cursor in the editor is blinking. It's a common problem[1][2].
[1] https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink [2] https://www.justanswer.com/neurology/j0wg1-team-started-issu...
Project page here: http://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max
Demos here: https://youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp
Long form (thesis) paper on the project: https://iainctduncan.github.io/papers/index.html
What are some other notable and open formats for notating scores? I'd like to know the what the popular formats are, do a survey and choose one for my own work.
https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/
It's an open JSON format that's being hashed out by members of the music technology community. It's not production-ready yet, but I encourage you to get involved in the discussions! https://github.com/w3c/mnx/
(I lead creation of the format, as one of the co-chairs of the W3C Music Notation Community Group.)
The Mutopia project [1] is magnificent but largely abandoned in favor of MuseScore [2] which uses MusicXML. The amount of music available there is staggering but locked in to their backend.
Unfortunately automated translation is difficult because Lilypond is very oriented towards specifics on how the notation is rendered.
And, if you are interested in general archives of music, IMSLP [3] (Internet Music Score Library Project) has to be mentioned as well, but mostly contains scans of existing engraved music.
[1] https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject
Right...
Call me crazy, but all the great music of today is being done in video games and cinema scoring. I'm sure this system is useful for some, but I can't help but feel the kinds of modern classical featured are just noise. The claim is often that music is cultural. I'm sure that's true, but then where is the great modern Western classical music? Why was it thrown away? There are reasonable explorations to be had. For example, modern composers could have chosen to integrate Jazz harmonies (which still sound concordant), but instead they chose to go off the deep end with atonality, aharmony, and arhythm. We gotta end the postmodernism and return to actually nice things.
And really, it's sad because the kinds of scores being produced with the rhythm changes every measure, etc. They really ultimately sound like the pretentious ramblings of some drunk/high guy at a MIDI controller instead of the carefully assembled score. It takes real talent to properly keep meter over the course of an entire song. Just banging some keys and then making other people attempt to replicate it... I mean props to the replicators (the players), but the scorer just threw some notes on a page.
In my opinion, this is a racist response by mainly European composers to the popularity of Jazz music which is associated mainly with African Americans, from whom the source originated. They were jealous of what they perceived as the novel rhythms and harmonies, but instead of building off that or inventing something new that still had rhythmic and harmonic value.. they did this
But serialism was too far for most people. And still is. Failed composer/critic Adorno, who adored serial music and is a Big Name on the scene, absolutely loathed jazz and popular music.
It's not really atonal. It's antitonal. Truly atonal music wouldn't care about standard pitches or notation at all, because they're still based on the harmonic series. It's antitonal because it pretends that's not true, while also trying its best to avoid the usual paths through harmonic space.
As for the quality - there's an opera called Wozzeck which is performed fairly regularly. The rest is mostly museum music - relegated to special academic festivals. Not mainstream at all.
It's actually very structured, and if you know what's happening you can hear the patterns and components going by.
But as music it has a very limited emotional range. And intellectually, most of it is pure crossword puzzling for the sake of it.
It's like literally everywhere! I almost exclusively listen to contemporary Western classical music (WCM) and it's never been more exciting and better. There has never been a time where there are so many different dominant styles at the same time. There are atonalists [1] like Unsuk Chin, Jennifer Koh, Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl. There are neo-Romanticists like Jennifer Higdon, Michael Torke, Thomas Ades. There are minimalists like Caroline Shaw, Max Richter, Bent Sorensen, Christine Southworth and their ur-father Philip Glass who still writes music at 86.
If you're interested in my full opinions about the cultural force of contemporary WCM please read this [2] HN comment of mine.
Seriously contemporary WCM is awesome. It's very cliche but "if you don't like it, move on".
> In my opinion, this is a racist response by mainly European composers to the popularity of Jazz music which is associated mainly with African Americans, from whom the source originated. They were jealous of what they perceived as the novel rhythms and harmonies, but instead of building off that or inventing something new that still had rhythmic and harmonic value.. they did this
Meh, I don't think this is true at all. They're just entirely different artistic traditions. Just because haiku exists doesn't mean American novels can't.
I don't dispute that tons of normie classical music listeners (like r/classicalmusic) are racists/elitists. These people almost exclusively listen to old German common practice stuff like Bach or Mozart. They pretend that 18th century German music is somehow superior to everything else. Almost none of them would consider Ligeti or Glass even classical music. This is not the contemporary Western classical music scene at all. It seems like you may not have a sophisticated enough understanding of this subculture, imho.
[1] mostly Ligeti/Messiaen inspired people as opposed to Serialists
Okay, you're crazy.
...But seriously, when's the last time you heard a good speed metal song in a video game? And no, Brütal Legend doesn't count.
> but then where is the great modern Western classical music?
What, like Johannsson? With how much new material is being released every year the question isn't "where are the great works," but "how do we separate the greatest works from the lesser ones?"
> We gotta end the postmodernism and return to actually nice things.
This reminds me of Beethoven's Große Fuge, which some called repellent and other called a masterpiece. It's like how I don't understand Cubism but some people love it so there must be something I just don't see.
And remember Hitchen's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
And Schneider is just one counterexample to your thesis.
Ok? Maybe they chose noisy examples on purpose? Focusing on their specific music choices is purely bikeshedding, and misses the point of the whole point of the project.
And your rant about "music of today" shows that you live in a bubble. There is no "music of today". There's a vast sea of musical diversity in this world.
> In my opinion, this is a racist response
It's really unclear what response you're referring to. Are you talking about your own response?