Background

In 2012, I started designing a music composition language called Alda. I was dreaming of a way to compose music using a text-based format, leaning on the command-line-oriented workflows that make me productive as a programmer.

Not long after that, I began to implement an interpreter for that language. In 2015, I wrote a blog post / tutorial that went viral on Reddit and Hacker News, and the project received a spike in attention and contributions. Since then, I've been traveling the world to present talks about Alda at various conferences, building an online community of users, and continuing to develop the language and runtime as much as possible in my spare time.

Alda is, and will always be, free and open source. It is a labor of love that I have invested a lot of time into, solely because I want it to exist, to make people productive, and to bring enjoyment into their lives.

More about Alda

Website: https://alda.io
GitHub: https://github.com/alda-lang/alda

Talks and demos:

• Functional Conf 2022
• Strange Loop, St. Louis, 2019
• Heart of Clojure, Leuven, 2019
• Compose Conference, Melbourne, 2018
• ICFP FARM, Nara, 2016
• Clojure Remote, 2016

The Future

It's become clear to me that Alda has brought joy to a lot of people, and that I can make the world a better place by continuing to maintain and improve it. I have a mountain of ideas about how to make Alda better, ranging from performance improvements to exciting new features like:

• Defining your own custom synthesizer instruments
• Support for live-coding (changing a score as it plays)
• Import a variety of formats like MIDI and MusicXML
• Export to MusicXML
• Render to WAV, MP3, etc.
• A more intelligent/interactive REPL experience

I care deeply about Alda and I would love to have the opportunity to work more on it. My hope is that with your support, I can afford to spend a greater part of my time developing the future of Alda.

🎶 💻 🎶