Thanks for sharing. I’m a musician and programmer, so I’m squarely in what I’d expect is your target audience. Since you’re posting an early version for feedback, here are some of my broadest initial thoughts.
From your README’s philosophy section: “You describe what you want to feel — ÆTHRA handles how it sounds.” But the rest of the documentation doesn’t yet feel aligned to that vision. The closest you get to that is when you describe your example chord progression as melancholic, but you as the composer already happened to know that this particular progression provides the feeling you have in mind.
I love the idea of a high level way to programmatically or idiomatically describe how music should feel, especially how the composition should evolve over time (perhaps even in surprising ways that are beyond current tools). I hope as you progress that you’re able to find innovative ways to build toward that vision.
The current feature set feels like it would be considerably more convenient in a GUI environment. Again, I hope that as you continue to build, it becomes more obvious why this is a language and not a visual synthesis/composition tool.
A little audio output demo would go a very long way in potentially getting me interested in playing around with this.
This is very much fun. Since I do not know what I am doing I simply ran Gemini on it to add a beat to pyramid song demo [0]. Is there music repls with LLM assistants built-in?
I loved to build backing tracks for guitar in Band-in-a-box, just from the chord progression and some settings. Leveraged little effort to interesting results. And the idea of a DSL is super. But I dunno how would you stand comparisons with audio rendered by pro DAW software loaded with a production quality sound library such as Hollywood Strings or similar if you render the audio yourself.
Ha, I was just playing with making a simple pad in webaudio and it evolved into a progression-playing backing track tool (vanilla html/js/css page). It would appear there are a lot of us in the Venn intersection of programmer/guitarist/practice time alone enjoyers.
Thanks for sharing. I’m a musician and programmer, so I’m squarely in what I’d expect is your target audience. Since you’re posting an early version for feedback, here are some of my broadest initial thoughts.
From your README’s philosophy section: “You describe what you want to feel — ÆTHRA handles how it sounds.” But the rest of the documentation doesn’t yet feel aligned to that vision. The closest you get to that is when you describe your example chord progression as melancholic, but you as the composer already happened to know that this particular progression provides the feeling you have in mind.
I love the idea of a high level way to programmatically or idiomatically describe how music should feel, especially how the composition should evolve over time (perhaps even in surprising ways that are beyond current tools). I hope as you progress that you’re able to find innovative ways to build toward that vision.
The current feature set feels like it would be considerably more convenient in a GUI environment. Again, I hope that as you continue to build, it becomes more obvious why this is a language and not a visual synthesis/composition tool.
A little audio output demo would go a very long way in potentially getting me interested in playing around with this.
Good luck!
How does this compare to https://strudel.cc/ ?
This is very much fun. Since I do not know what I am doing I simply ran Gemini on it to add a beat to pyramid song demo [0]. Is there music repls with LLM assistants built-in?
[0] https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vICJQeXJhbWlkIFNvbmcgKFJhdyBBYnN0cmFj...
Have you heard of Switch-Angel? If not, check out https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hbZb1Q0mM7k (to pick one) for a taste of what Strudel is capable of in "real time".
I loved to build backing tracks for guitar in Band-in-a-box, just from the chord progression and some settings. Leveraged little effort to interesting results. And the idea of a DSL is super. But I dunno how would you stand comparisons with audio rendered by pro DAW software loaded with a production quality sound library such as Hollywood Strings or similar if you render the audio yourself.
Ha, I was just playing with making a simple pad in webaudio and it evolved into a progression-playing backing track tool (vanilla html/js/css page). It would appear there are a lot of us in the Venn intersection of programmer/guitarist/practice time alone enjoyers.
DSL for backing tracks: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks
I clicked the link but missed the show. I'd like to revisit the project when there is something to look at and listen to.
Please can you link to a video of it being used?
Yes. I will upload after some days
How does this relate to existing systems?
E.g. Csound