Show HN: Modest – musical harmony library for Lua

 (github.com)

62 points | by esbudylin16 小时前

5 comments

  • delineator7 小时前
    Things get more interesting when we explore musical tunings other than the 12 equal divisions of the octave (EDO) of Western music.

    You can define interval structure as a sequence of large L, small s, and optionally medium M steps.

    For example, the Major diatonic scale, a 7 note scale from 12 EDO, in Ls notation is:

       LLsLLLs  with L: 2  s: 1 (12=2+2+1+2+2+2+1)
    A 6 note scale (Gorgo-6) in 16 EDO is:

       LLsLLL  with L: 3  s: 1 (16=3+3+1+3+3+3)
    You can then explore frequency ratios beyond those available in 12 EDO, see this Lua file: https://github.com/robmckinnon/pitfalls/blob/main/lib/ratios...

    E.g. the Gorgo-6 scale has the intervals S2 (septimal major second), d4 (Barbados third), N4 (undevicesimal wide fourth), s6 (septimal sixth), s7 (septimal minor seventh).

    And chords based on those ratios, see Lua file: https://github.com/robmckinnon/pitfalls/blob/main/lib/chords...

    The above links are Lua code files for a monome norns library for exploring microtonal tuning: https://llllllll.co/t/pitfalls/37795

  • Rochus13 小时前
    What is the target use case of the library? Aren't chord, note and interval objects redundant (i.e. a chord is a set of notes of a specific distance, where the latter is an interval)? The chords themselves are just a subset of scales, of which a finite number exists (see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/musictools/). Do you consider the relation of chords and scales, and modulations within and between scales? Concerning Lisp, are you aware of https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/s7/s7.html or https://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/?
    • esbudylin11 小时前
      Thanks for sharing Common Music! I haven't heard of it, it seems worth studying.

      Speaking of use cases, I started this project with the idea of making a flexible parser for chord symbols. In the process of solving this problem, I wrote some general-purpose utilities, which eventually took form of this library. I'm making it public in the hope that it will be useful to others who use Lua for music and audio programming.

      I haven't yet implemented the functions related to scales. I'm still thinking about their relation to chords and how to express it in the library's API.

  • yots15 小时前
    Nice work! Perhaps this could interest users of norns[1], many of which are active on the lines[2] message board.

    1. https://github.com/monome/norns

    2. https://llllllll.co/

    • esbudylin14 小时前
      Thanks for the pointers! I'll try to spread the word there as well.
  • summarity13 小时前
    Oh very neat. I had worked with Fennel inside touchOSC to create custom control surfaces and used it extensively for chord identification logic. The code is private, but here's an excerpt (e.g. norm-chord tries to identify chords based on MIDI notes): https://gist.github.com/turbo/264d44f4f820b5b32fdd13b8ef475d...

    You're right it's very expressive. I wish there was something like Teal, but for Fennel. I know there are libraries for runtime typing, but my ideal language would be a gradually statically typed Fennel.

  • helpfulContrib7 小时前
    [dead]