I use Alda for some personal music projects – very simple language to produce music you can hear. Not quite as flexible as Lilypond, but much easier to start.
I moved some comments into this new wiki post thread.
I’ve been trying to get back into music during the quarantine. I have an old electric guitar that I assembled from parts when I was about 15. I realized that there is space for a microcontroller, and the guitar is in bad enough shape that I don’t have to worry much about breaking anything. I might try to put a Raspberry Pi Zero in here, or some other kind of controls, like a kill switch that can be tapped. I’m not sure what I will do with it yet and am still looking for ideas.
SuperCollider was mentioned in the virtual cafe today.
SuperCollider is a platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists, and researchers working with sound. It is free and open source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
SuperCollider features three major components:
scsynth, a real-time audio server, forms the core of the platform. It features 400+ unit generators (“UGens”) for analysis, synthesis, and processing. Its granularity allows the fluid combination of many known and unknown audio techniques, moving between additive and subtractive synthesis, FM, granular synthesis, FFT, and physical modeling. You can write your own UGens in C++, and users have already contributed several hundred more to the sc3-plugins repository.
sclang, an interpreted programming language. It is focused on sound, but not limited to any specific domain. sclang controls scsynth via Open Sound Control. You can use it for algorithmic composition and sequencing, finding new sound synthesis methods, connecting your app to external hardware including MIDI controllers, network music, writing GUIs and visual displays, or for your daily programming experiments. It has a stock of user-contributed extensions called Quarks.
scide is an editor for sclang with an integrated help system.
SuperCollider was developed by James McCartney and originally released in 1996. In 2002, he generously released it as free software under the GNU General Public License. It is now maintained and developed by an active and enthusiastic community.
Max was mentioned in chat. It isn’t free, but it looks interesting.
Also Pure Data:
Pd is natively designed to enable live collaboration across networks or the Internet, allowing musicians connected via LAN or even in disparate parts of the globe to create music together in real time.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to use Arturia’s ARP 2600 simulator, and it sparked more interest in synthesizers in general. It’s the synth that was used to create R2D2’s voice.
There’s a demo of the newer hardware model here: