An important design goal of Alda is that the language should not be a Turing-complete programming environment. This keeps Alda simple and focused on doing what it does best: being an easy-to-learn, markup-like text language for music composition.

At the same time, I really enjoy being able to compose algorithmic music by writing programs that generate Alda scores. This was what led me to make the Clojure library alda-clj.

Here are a couple of basic examples showing how you can use alda-clj in a Clojure program or REPL session:

;; Import all of the functions from alda.core into the current context
(require '[alda.core :refer :all])

;; Play a whole note G2 on a trombone
(play!
  (part "trombone")
  (octave 2)
  (note (pitch :g) (note-length 1)))

;; Play "C D E F G" 4 times at random tempos in the range of 60-260 BPM
(play!
  (part "piano")
  (for [bpm (repeatedly 4 #(+ 60 (rand-int 200)))]
    [(tempo bpm)
     (for [letter [:c :d :e :f :g]]
       (note (pitch letter) (note-length 8)))]))

alda-clj is old news, though. I wrote alda-clj back in December 2018. An idea that I find much more compelling is that anybody can come along and create their own library for generative music or live-coding that uses Alda as a platform, not just for Clojure, but for any language.

I’ve been excited about this concept for a long time, now. Every now and then, a conversation pops up somewhere about writing programs in <insert language here> to make music with Alda. I was surprised to see how quickly I could write my own library that does this in Clojure. It only took me a couple of days to write! …Granted, I am the creator of Alda, so it was probably a little bit easier for me to do it than it would be for anyone else. But even if that weren’t the case, I still think that most people who’ve been programming for at least a couple of years could write a library like alda-clj for their language of choice within a matter of days.

The other day, somebody in the Alda Slack group asked me if there was a reference for implementing a library for Alda in another language. This made me realize that, despite having written in the past about it being easy to implement an Alda library in your language of choice, I haven’t provided any specific guidance about how somebody might go about doing that.

Until now.

I just finished writing a step-by-step guide for any programmer who wants to write their own Alda library for their language of choice. At the time of writing, I’m aware of only two such libraries: alda-clj (Clojure) and alda-rb (Ruby). Maybe your favorite language will be next! :)

The guide is here. Feedback welcome! I hope you find it helpful and that some of you might get the itch to try your hand at writing an Alda library for <insert language here>.

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