Sound As Pure Form: Music Language Inspired by Supercollider, APL, and Forth

by mindcrimeon 6/22/2025, 2:17 AMwith 20 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY2WYXOdXoM

by poloticson 6/22/2025, 8:34 AM

I am then quite torn: keep using SuperCollider with all the accumulated UGens and example code, or switch to this elegant language and start over with a lot of basics... Leading to the question: any bridges or ways to integrate and reuse between the two?

by pierrecon 6/22/2025, 5:25 AM

Neat, I've been meaning to check out this language! I believe it's been in the works for a long time, but only recently published. The syntax may seem esoteric at first, but it turns out the concatenative approach is uniquely suited to creative audio DSP. It's fairly simple once you get the basic idea.

The author probably hasn't tried them (otherwise they would be in the Readme), but there are actually a couple of existing Forth-like audio languages. Quite the niche. I'm one of the most avid users of one such language called Sporth, for which I made an online live playground at https://audiomasher.org/

The Sporth author created multiple stack-based audio languages and I haven't even kept up with all of it. He has some interesting projects at https://git.sr.ht/~pbatch/

In any case, sapf looks very carefully designed, and the addition of functional elements inspired by APL seems like it complements the stack approach very well. And the examples actually sound good to my ears, which isn't a requirement but generally a good sign. I'm tempted to get cracking on a WASM build right away...

by spacechild1on 6/22/2025, 8:34 AM

For those who don't know: lfnoise is James McCartney, the original author of Supercollider.

by vanderZwanon 6/22/2025, 8:03 AM

> It intends to do for lazy sequences what APL does for arrays: provide very high level functions with pervasive automatic mapping, scanning, and reduction operators.

Does anyone else find this extremely cool from a conceptual point of view, even without the music language context? (very tempted to make an "it's music to my ears" dad joke right now)

by chaosprinton 6/22/2025, 7:07 AM

If you are interested in music language, you might also want to try Glicol:

https://glicol.org/

The syntax is hardware-inspired, wysiwyg-style lazy diff graph updating. you can use it directly through wasm on the web page; there is also a cross-platform cli version:

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

I am currently working on porting it to no std embedded systems

by ofalkaedon 6/22/2025, 5:04 AM

What are the chances of getting this to compile on linux? I have no idea about how to deal with an Xcode project or have enough C++ knowledge to know if this can even be compiled on linux. CoreFoundation.h looks to be OSX? and on my quick glance that looks to be the main hurdle but that is as much as I can say.

by ViscountPenguinon 6/22/2025, 3:43 AM

Any chance of a flatpak (or some form of Linux Binary) for this? I've been wanting to play around with Music Programming for ages, but none of the options I looked at play well with Ubuntu. SonicPi in particular didn't run no matter what I did, I had to dualboot into Windows to get it working :'(