Sullivan Boyd

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dancigers, Mark

Area of Concentration

Music

Abstract

In electronic music academia, there are programming languages that can be used to generate music or to describe signal chains for sound that's rendered in realtime, as the program is being written; they can be "live coded." These programming environments, used exclusively for sound and music, belong in the category of domain- specific programming languages, although in the course of this thesis they are referred to using their specific domain: music programming languages. While they receive special attention in the course of an electronic music pedagogy in academia (they're taught in electronic music classes), they remain largely a curiosity to outsiders, both in the general public and in electronic music professions. Because they exist in the space in between music and computer science, few claim to be experts in the subject overall. Critiques on the usability of music languages are sparse; in academia, both in music and computer science, well-researched critiques on these languages are effectively absent altogether. Some of these languages are a sort of outsider art, written completely outside of academic or professional contexts altogether, while others are the culmination of academic research and/or commercial products. This thesis describes methods of comparing programming languages in general based on the features they offer, the quality of the "backend" that turns programs in these languages into sounds, and the usability of such languages for electronic musicians of average computer literacy. It then uses these methods and some basic computer science rigor to compare several specific music programming languages. Projects and examples for generating sound and music in these languages, in general-purpose languages like C++, and using professional tools like Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are also included, and are used to demonstrate these comparisons and to suggest under which circumstances some tools are more useful than others.

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