Writing music with Alda #3: flats, sharps, and key signatures

This is the third installment in a series where I guide you through learning how to write music using Alda. So far, we’ve covered: #1: Setup and first notes #2: Rhythm and meter White keys and black keys So far in this series, we’ve been working with 7 notes: C D E F G A B C On a piano... (more)

Writing music with Alda #2: rhythm and meter

This is the second installment in a series where I guide you through learning how to write music using Alda. So far, we’ve covered: #1: Setup and first notes Note lengths Now that we know how to make different notes, we can start to play around with making the notes longer or shorter. Listen... (more)

Writing music with Alda #1: your first notes

Every now and then, somebody tells me that they just installed Alda and they’re enjoying it, but that they aren’t quite sure where to start when it comes to writing a piece of music. The trouble is that Alda is significantly more useful to those of us who already have some knowledge of songwriti... (more)

Minutiae #5: Strange Loop, Mantra & Chronoid

Strange Loop I attended Strange Loop for the third time last weekend, and the experience was as awesome as ever. This year, I had the honor of giving a talk, and I think it went over well! I talked about the history of the architectural design of Alda, and how the relationship between Alda and ... (more)

Minutiae #4: Strange Loop talk, git submodules

Polishing my Strange Loop talk With Strange Loop drawing closer, I’ve been spending most of my free time tweaking and practicing my talk about the dynamic relationship between Alda and Clojure. As I tend to do, I planned way too much material and so I ending up having to trim down the sections... (more)

Minutiae #3: alda-clj lightning demo, weather data, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

alda-clj lightning demo As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had the pleasure of attending the Heart of Clojure conference in Belgium this month. Somebody suggested that I give a 5-minute lightning talk about Alda, so I signed up at the last minute and (after some hasty preparation) gave a qu... (more)

Minutiae #2: Crux, slideshow tools, Asciidoc, Heart of Clojure

Here’s some stuff I’ve been spending time on lately: Crux tutorial The UK-based Clojure consulting company JUXT recently released Crux, an open source, bitemporal, document-oriented database. I thought it was interesting when I heard about it, but I haven’t had a good opportunity to try it out... (more)

Minutiae #1: Alda stuff, Clojure tooling for Vim

I’ve been meaning to update this blog more often for a long time now. The problem I have is that I have a lot of interesting things that I could write about, but I feel like it would take so much effort to produce a blog post worth reading, I just never have the time to do it. As a result, I’ve ... (more)

Out of the Blue

In January 2019, I collaborated with my wife, choreographer Renay Aumiller, to create a modern dance piece called Out of the Blue. I wrote a program that prompted the audience to contribute a list of body parts and dance qualities, and then fed that creative input into an algorithm to randomly g... (more)

A Music Composition Language With a Functional Backbone

A couple months ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak about Alda at the Compose::Melbourne conference in Australia! Compose is a conference all about functional programming as it pertains to professionals, academics and hobbyists alike. The conference was great and I had a fantastic... (more)