About
GoldenPond is an experimental music notation / domain-specific programming language which adds higher level intentions or goals using the concepts from functional harmony. You express music in terms of chord degrees and modifications, rather than mere descriptions of notes. So you can say what the music is trying to do, rather than just what it does.
The aim is to help computer based composers and live-coders, including this author, to understand and apply more "advanced" music theory ideas by making them explicit and easy to express in the language.
GoldenPond was inspired by my frustration at realising that code offered so much expressivity for composing music, but that so much live-coding seemed stuck in replicating the behaviours of equipment designed for minimal loop-based music. We could describe a chord progression in a few keystrokes, but end up continually fiddling with a number representing the cutoff frequency of a low-pass filter. Text is a wonderfully expressive medium, but we're using it as the world's least ergonomically efficient knob!
Ultimately I'm guided by the question: "could a music programming language be expressive enough that it would be possible to live-code music of the complexity of a Mahler Symphony, on the fly?" What abstractions would such a language need? And would such a practice be viable, either technically or artistically?