In which Lisp generates music
5 points
1 hour ago
| 2 comments
| abhirag.com
| HN
lucy_hnatchuk
1 hour ago
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Nice project! Love the idea of live‑coding music with Lisp’s code‑as‑data philosophy — feels very natural for exploring patterns in real time.
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abhirag
1 hour ago
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Comment seems AI generated, thanks anyway!
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abhirag
1 hour ago
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Livecoding Music with Fennel and Renoise
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Rochus
1 hour ago
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Sounds nice, thanks. Do you also have experience in other live coding languages? Can you share your thoughts about advantages/disadvantages of Lisp compared to others?
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abhirag
1 hour ago
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Hey, thanks for taking a look! I have messed around with Clojure (Overtone) and Sonic Pi (Ruby dialect) and normally prefer lisps for anything fun :)

Regarding advantages/disadvantages, Lisp is always very terse which helps and with structural editing juggling parens becomes a non-issue. Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that.

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Rochus
11 minutes ago
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I'm still not sure on which composition language to focus on. I definitely don't like languages where a lot of the syntax is "hidden" in strings (such as e.g. in Tidal). Lisp has aspects which fit to music intuitively, but as soon as you try to represent the full information expected by Midi the code gets messy. Interestingly, Common Music and Nyquist went away from Lisp towards SAL because composers apparently preferred a Pascal like infix syntax over the Lisp way.
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