I think this is a key thing to notice about Alda. It doesn&#x27;t attempt to provide abstractions for things like keys, scales, or even measures and time signatures. It&#x27;s more like writing Markdown: you already know what you want to write; it just gives you a way to represent it in a compact way and turn it into something you can hear back without having to reason too much about what you&#x27;ve written. I want Alda to be as close as possible to a sheet of staff paper that you can write notes on. MML is a very similar language in this regard. The idea is that it&#x27;s up to the composer to write down the exact notes he&#x2F;she wants, exactly how he&#x2F;she wants them.<p>I realize this is disappointing if you&#x27;re looking for something with more abstractions, but on the bright side, I think there are some great languages out there that do exactly that. If you haven&#x27;t already, have a look at Music-Suite ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;music-suite.github.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ref" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;music-suite.github.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ref</a> ) and Overtone ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;overtone.github.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;overtone.github.io</a> ), along with the Leipzig library, which adds functional programming abstractions for use with Overtone ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ctford&#x2F;leipzig" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ctford&#x2F;leipzig</a> )