Alda is a New “Music Programming Language” that Anybody Can Use

 Developer Dave Yarwood has developed a music programming language Alda. Without any previous programming language experience, musicians can write music with the simple syntax.

Today, to compose digital music, producers and composers need to make use of sophisticated tools. Everything about the way digital music is produced is about to change, thanks to a new programming language known as Alda. Alda’s tagline is: A music programming language for musicians.

Alda is developed by developer Dave Yarwood who has made writing digital scores easy. Using Alda, a person with no coding experience can write music. Alda encompasses a simple syntax to compose MIDI scores in your humble text editor without the need to learn new software and production tools.

Developer Yarwood says that he found GUI-based tools (Example: Sibelius) distracting and cumbersome while writing music. He says: “Alda’s ambition is to become a powerful and flexible programming language that can be used to create music in a variety of genres by typing some code into a text editor and running a program that compiles the code and turns it into sound.”

Various commands like note lengths, multiple instruments, accidentals and more are supported. Right now, Alda is useful for preliminary notation and the features like repeats and transposition are in the works. Yarwood says that he wants to extend Alda’s scope to bring the support for samples and sounds beyond the common MIDI sound.

Yarwood has explained everything about music programming language Alda on GitHub. Read more there and tell us your thoughts in the comments below.