I favored the flexibility of ordering concurrent notes differently in MIDI over having the sheet music uniquely define a program. It gives the programmer more choices in how notes can be combined.
But there could be a default ordering -- I would think reading a chord from bottom to top -- for a piece of music where the score came first and the MIDI representation or performance of that score second.
It's funny you link to Piet; I began Velato by asking what would Piet be as music. Some programs are instantly recognizable as Piet while others are hardly recognizable as such; the language has its own aesthetic and yet programmers bring their own style to its set of visual constraints, all through fairly basic rules. In Velato, all notes are read in relation to a root note that can change between commands, even in the middle of a single chord. That was meant to allow for more choice in how a programmer constructs a piece of music.
Hi, I'm the creator of Velato. I will be reworking the website to include more examples later this year. In the mean time, the latest version of the compiler is on github: https://github.com/rottytooth/Velato
No one has yet written a quine although I would love to see one -- perhaps outputting its representation in lilypond format.
Since you're the author I can ask you directly, what the purpose is of the language. Why did you choose MIDI as a form of representation? What kind of programs are you implementing with it? Where are these programs supposed to be executed, on MIDI instruments?
I first made the language (fifteen years ago!) out of curiosity about esolangs and as a first try at writing a compiler. And for fun, yes. Since then, I've written more about multicoding -- the way two readings of code impact each other -- and thought more about the music that results (some links in my comment below). This is the aspect of the language that interests me now.
I chose MIDI since it's a standard and leaves to the programmer the choice of tool to compose the program. There's an IDE in the works geared for live performance of the language (that will not be MIDI, but not ready to say yet how it will work; it has the same lexicon but is quite a different language in practice).
> “Velato offers an unusual challenge to programmer-musicians: to compose a musical piece that, in addition to expressing their aims musically, fills the constraints necessary to compile to a working Velato program.”
It seems like Velato’s purpose is to provide an unusual and interesting creative constraint for people who can both code and write music.
It means come up with a code goal and a music goal, and fulfill both with a Velato program. For example, can you write MIDI file which finds the nth Fibonnaci number and sounds good to your friend when played with a piano instrument (a real one or a sound sample)?
Whenever I see questions like this I have to wonder: Do you really lack the creative spark that lets you imagine why something like this would be fun to create?
Have you ever read Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_? (also published as _Magister Audi_)
Every time I see alternative representations of knowledge/computer code/algorithms it comes to mind.
Would you expect a person to be able to achieve a mastery of this to the point where they could play and control something in an improvisation? Say something like to the character Agatha Heterodyne of Kaja and Phil Foglio's web comic _Girl Genius_ controlling an army of clanks (robots):
I wish more websites were still HTTP! I can't access most of the modern web from my vintage computers and I see no reason I need security on websites I'm not logging into.
Even for non-login sessions, HTTPS is key. It isn't just about credential protection. It guards against data tampering in transit and is therefore crucial for end-to-end data integrity. What you are saying is basically that you don't care about integrity, fair enough, but many people including me do.
In 2009, I made Velato, an esolang where code is written in pitch values (https://github.com/rottytooth/Velato) encoded as MIDI files. So sort of the opposite of writing algorithmic music (where the human programmer writes music to satisfy conditions of the program). Before switching to LilyPond, I'd used GUIDO with a GUIDO-to-MIDI generator, but it was always awkward. Part of the challenge is that notes can be sounded simultaneously to make the score work better musically, but still need to appear in the correct sequence in the MIDI file for the program to succeed; something that LilyPond handles correctly. There's a transparency to how LilyPond functions that is not always there with programs that try to be "helpful" and clean-up or rearrange information.
I see the more creative esolangs like this as beautiful and strange to think and code in; a formal play on language design. Not everything needs to be practical or a learning experience.
