Haskore

Haskore is a set of Haskell modules for creating, analysing and manipulating music. Music can be made audible through various back-ends. (See below.) A more recent, but less stable version, is available as Darcs repository at http://code.haskell.org/haskore/revised/.

Features

Example

To get an impression how intuitive music composition with Haskore is, see the following example code (runs with revised Haskore):

chords =
    (c 0 qn () =:= e 0 qn () =:= g 0 qn ()) +:+
    (c 0 qn () =:= f 0 qn () =:= a 0 qn ()) +:+
    (d 0 qn () =:= g 0 qn () =:= b 0 qn ())

song =
    MidiMusic.fromMelodyNullAttr MidiMusic.AcousticGrandPiano
       (Music.transpose (-48) (Music.changeTempo 3 chords))

The (=:=) means parallel composition and (+:+) means serial composition of musical objects.

Backends

Ideally you can compose a song once in Haskore, and then play it by several back-ends. Practically this is more difficult, since all back-ends have different functionality (otherwise there wouldn't be so many).

These back-ends are currently supported:

MIDI (both file and realtime)
CSound
SuperCollider
Audio files rendered by pure Haskell code.

ToDo:

Notation output (Lilypond, partially done in CAEC, see below).

Community

There is no Haskore related mailing list, but Haskore related discussion is very welcome at the Haskell art mailing list.

Getting started

Platforms

The core Haskore can run on both Linux and Windows. Only various back-ends and real-time functionality are critical. So far, real-time playback and use of SuperCollider is only usable on Linux.

In future Haskore should consist of a small core for music composition, analysis and manipulation and separate packages for connecting to various back-ends and separated real-time stuff. The splitting made some progress, but is still not at its end.

Installation using cabal

(There are more detailed installation instructions here, if the following does not work)

Prerequisites: You should be able to fetch a package using Darcs and configure/build/install it using cabal.

Step 0. Since it is the most convenient way of installation, try to install as many as possible packages from Hackage using cabal-install. Not all packages are available on Hackage because of their experimental state.

 cabal install midi    # this will also install non-negative, event-list
 cabal install data-accessor
 cabal install markov-chain

Step 1. Install the remaining packages such that at the end the following packages are installed:

 non-negative, event-list, data-accessor, markov-chain, midi, haskore

If cabal-install worked, there should only haskore be left for installation.

Step 2. Choose a folder where some haskell packages can be stored.

Step 3. Get the packages. That is, for each PACKAGE call

 darcs get http://code.haskell.org/PACKAGE

or

 darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~thielema/PACKAGE

Step 4. Build and install the packages that you got by darcs. For each PACKAGE (in the order of above)

 cd PACKAGE
 runhaskell Setup.lhs configure (--prefix=/usr/local --user)
 runhaskell Setup.lhs build
 runhaskell Setup.lhs install

Step 5. On Linux you may also wish to use SuperCollider. If you are uncertain, if it is worth the trouble, then listen to the examples given in the Links section. SuperCollider support requires installation of the packages haskore-realtime and haskore-supercollider in the way that is described above.

Step 6. To get something to listen follow the hints in the Readme file of the haskore package.

Projects

A lot of projects were initiated that use the Haskore framework or something in the spirit of Haskore. This page may help to keep an overview of all projects. All maintainers of Haskore related projects are encouraged to add their project here and keep the references up to date.

AuDi	Peter Steffen	Course material for Algorithms and Data Structures I - A formula language for music ("Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen I - Eine Formelsprache fuer Musik")
AutoTrack	Stefan Ratschan	A tool for creating practizing and demo tracks from chord charts. You feed the program with a chord chart, set the desired style (jazz, bossa, etc.), tempo, key etc. and it produces a simple MIDI file containing an according bass and drum track. Includes a lot of examples.
CAEC	Matt Munz	Computer-Aided Etude Composition in Haskell
Design experiments	Henning Thielemann	Test of several changes of Haskore's design targetting at more flexibility and consistency
Emile	Adam Bermingham	Eight-Bar Melody Generation in Haskell. Automatic composition based on two initial bars
Gore	Johannes Waldmann	Convert a melody description in a string into the Haskore Music data structure. Thus simple melodies can be written much more condensed.
HasChorus	Martin Schwenke	A set of Haskell modules written on top of Haskore to make it easier to sequence simple, repetitive music
Jazkore	Jean-François Paiement	A model of melodic jazz improvisation in functional programming
Lilypond back-end	Jeffrey R. Lewis	A back-end for Haskore to produce Lilypond notation files.
Microtonal music	Magnus Jonsson	This is not Haskore related, though integration into Haskore would be nice
Polymorphic Temporal Media	Paul Hudak	An Algebraic Theory of Polymorphic Temporal Media - A generalization of Haskore Music and MDL as well as Fran and FAL animation
T-shirt	Fritz Ruehr	Haskore T-Shirt featuring the 8 laws of polymorphic temporal media

Papers

Paul Hudak: An Algebraic Theory of Polymorphic Temporal Media - A generalization of Haskore Music and MDL as well as Fran and FAL animation
Henning Thielemann: Audio Processing using Haskell

Links

A dummy's guide to Haskore (GIT repository)
Wikipedia entry about Haskore
Various Haskore examples for CSound, MIDI, SuperCollider and Haskell-Synthesizer presented on HAL2 by Henning Thielemann, also see the video of the talk (German)