I&#x27;ve had a lot of experience with various musical languages (ChucK, Csound, Supercollider, Max&#x2F;MSP, PD, Faust etc.) I&#x27;ve even designed a few music languages for myself. For what it&#x27;s worth, I did go to a music school and graduated with a bachelors degree in music, with a strong focus in computer music composition.<p>In the case of Alda, I&#x27;m a little underwhelmed. To be fair, it seems that the author of this software has done a good job meeting his goals. The syntax does look quite intuitive, basing it off of Lilypond syntax was a good choice IMO. I wouldn&#x27;t call it a programming lanuage, and it can&#x27;t do <i>everything</i> I want, but it seems to fit certain types of music quite well. Here is my big issue:<p>&gt;In the near future, Alda’s scope will be expanded to include sounds synthesized from basic waveforms, samples loaded from sound files, and perhaps other forms of synthesis.<p>I don&#x27;t want to say Alda sounds &quot;bad&quot;, because soundfonts, samples, and basic waveforms have their place for certain styles of music, but it is certainly quite limiting. Considering that there are massive books written about the &quot;perhaps other forms of synthesis&quot;, it doesn&#x27;t seem like sound itself to be too big a focus.<p>From what I&#x27;m reading, Alda is essentially a MIDI file generator. It doesn&#x27;t actually produce music, rather, it sends MIDI instructions for how to play music somewhere and leaves it up some other program to make the sounds. All of the other music languages I&#x27;ve mentioned can <i>actually</i> make music internally.<p>Have you ever considered using other music languages with Alda. Overtone is just Supercollider + Clojure, so I&#x27;m sure you do something similar. I imagine it would be pretty trivial to get Alda to write a Csound score, since it&#x27;s basically just a text table. PD has libpd, which I&#x27;ve had limited success with. I might as well mention my project Soundpipe as a possible DSP engine as well: www.github.com&#x2F;PaulBatchelor&#x2F;Soundpipe.git