Trash Signal's album is out now on Bandcamp!

Happy new year! 🎇 I’m happy to announce that my synth punk band Trash Signal’s album is out now on our Bandcamp. We’re super proud of this album. You can listen to the whole thing for free, and if you’d like to support us, you can also pay to download the 8 song album. We worked hard on this, a... (more)

Using lots of instruments in an Alda score

Hello again. Another year gone by, another new feature for Alda! I just released Alda 2.3.0 yesterday, and it features some improvements to the way that Alda determines which MIDI channel to use for each instrument part, and even for individual notes. This is something that I’d been meaning to ... (more)

MusicXML import and other new Alda features

Hey everyone! It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted an update about Alda. First of all, rest assured that I’m still here, and I’m as interested as ever in taking Alda in fun, new directions. I wanted to share a little update about what I’ve been up to lately with Alda. Moreover, I want to hi... (more)

JUXT Cast interview at Strange Loop 2022

This past September, while I was attending Strange Loop in St. Louis, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jordan Miller (who has a podcast called Lost in Lambduhhs) for a podcast series by JUXT and Vouch where they interviewed Strange Loop attendees to “learn about their interests, on... (more)

Trash Signal - "The Palms"

I’ve started a new band called Trash Signal, and I’m excited to announce that our first single, “The Palms”, is available now on all of the major streaming services (Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, etc.). Look for it wherever you listen to music! You can also listen to it right here: The Palms by T... (more)

Alda welcomes your Hacktoberfest contributions!

An community member in the Alda Slack group recommended that I register Alda as an open source project for Hacktoberfest participants to contribute pull requests to, so after giving it some thought, I did! The idea behind Hacktoberfest is that the organizers will reward anyone who makes 4 contr... (more)

Clojure through the lens of music

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Functional Conf, a functional programming conference that usually takes place in India, but was all virtual this year due to the pandemic. I had a great time! Here is the video of my talk, which was about how we can better understand the functions in... (more)

10 Bash quirks and how to live with them

I have a love/hate relationship with Bash. It’s a quirky little language with many subtleties that make it all too easy to make mistakes. It’s not uncommon for programmers writing Bash scripts to discover bugs in their scripts related to a variety of things, including getting some obscure synta... (more)

Announcing Alda 2

I’m excited to announce the release of Alda 2.0.0! This new version of Alda is a from-the-ground-up rewrite that I’ve been working on since late 2018, and I couldn’t be happier to finally share it with the world. Despite the shiny new version number, at a language level, Alda 2 is almost exactl... (more)

Why I'm rewriting Alda in Go and Kotlin

Over the last 2 years or so, I’ve been working on a ground-up rewrite of Alda, the music composition programming language that has been my passion project since 2012. Now that I’m finally almost done(!) with the rewrite and just about ready to release Alda 2 to the world, I figured I should expl... (more)