#music programming

I have been programming computers in order to algorithmically compose music since 1979 or 1980, that's 46 years. And I am still doing it....

During this period, I made a lot of mistakes that have ended up costing me a great deal of wasted time and effort. I will discuss these here, in the faint hope what I have learned might save somebody else some pain.

However, first I must say, I am not sorry I chose this path. In spite of the wasted time and effort, it has enabled me to make music that I simply would not have been able to make without the software I have written.

So, what were these mistakes, and how could they have been avoided? (I have discussed some of this in my article here on How to Program, and I will be updating that article soon to reflect my experience with artificial intelligence.)

Constantly changing the infrastructure; for example, using first Fortran, then Pascal, then C, then BASIC, then C++, then Python, then Lua, then JavaScript, when using the most capable language (C++) only, and wrapping the C++ library to provide implementations usable in other languages, would have saved me a lot of time. Also, working first on Windows, then on Linux, then on macOS, when moving as soon as possible to macOS would (in hindsight, of course!) have been the wiser move.

Trying to reinvent the wheel; that is, for example, implementing chord space code in Python, JavaScript, and C++, when doing it only in C++ and then wrapping it for Python and JavaScript is the right approach (which I have now adopted).

This post concerns what I have learned in the course of writing some fairly large bodies of C++ library code that is then wrapped in some dynamic language to be used for doing algorithmic composition. 

I am referring to Csound and especially to CsoundAC.

I have used various facilities to generate bindings from C++ to Python, Java, Lua, Common Lisp, and JavaScript. I have used Swig, Python ctypes, Common Lisp cffi, and now Emscripten’s Embind template library (similar to boost::python which I did experiment with once).

There’s a lot to be said for writing a library in C++, which is a truly powerful language that also compiles to very fast code. However, at the moment I am committed to using both SWIG for Python and Emsripten’s Embind for providing JavaScript interfaces to CsoundAC compiled for WebAssembly.

What I have learned is this:

Paul Doornbusch, How Australia played the world’s first music on a computer, «The Conversation», June 26, 2016. Plus: Paul Doornbusch, Computer Sound Synthesis in 1951: The Music of CSIRAC, «Computer Music Journal», Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 2004, pp. 10-25, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (pdf here). Plus: Paul Doornbusch, The Music of CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer Music, Common Ground, 2005. Plus: Trevor Pearcey Interview about CSIRAC Music, October 1996 (video)

that’s right, it was me.