Posts tagged: music
Ristretto 5/Line Composition Software #1
While I was working on Juere, I could feel myself getting sick of programming, and I was stalling on drawing, so I figured I'd learn to compose music just to rotate onto something different. And if nothing else I'd at least have something less fa/g/gy to post about here. But here I am programming again so obviously something's gone wrong.

After playing around on a couple trackers and DAWs for a while and realizing I wasn't going anywhere I figured I'd study proper music theory, which meant using proper staff notation. Here's one of the first examples from the book I started with.

I spent a day or two trying to copy this down across a ton of freeware composition software and most of them kept trying to alter the notation or otherwise were just slow and annoying to use. So naturally, I have to write my own. Bleh.

Anyways, I got the first step towards that down a while ago, which was getting and abstracting over MIDI output on Windows 7. Targeting MIDI output over Windows 7, because what kind of sick masochist does audio work on Linux?
As for abstractions, I pretty much just went through what Stone's book introduces in it's Rudiments--Notes have a name C through A and an Octave, multiple notes can be blocked together in one "Spot", sharpened, flattened, dotted and tied separately from the key signature. So long as it can be turned into a MIDI signal it's the composer's problem to keep their notation neat and proper. I can do a proper didactic literate source code thing if someone would find it useful.

Some parsing for debugging sanity and it's good enough for me to move on to GUI work, which is what I've been working, more off than on, for the last couple of weeks. I haven't set up git on my windows machine yet but that should be coming shortly.
Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:34:04 GMT
Ristretto Music Composition #1
As I mentioned in the 5line thread, I've twiddling with music composition lately.

For a while I was just playing with as many old VSTs as I could get my hands on from Archive.org and seeing what sounds I could get out of them but, ah...none of it sounded very good.

So, seeing as I'm clearly not some kind of beefheartesque savant that can conjure an entire system of music from first principles, I figured I'd study music theory for a while first, starting with Stone's "Music Theory and Composition".

Feel free to post about anything music or composition related ITT.
Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:54:35 GMT