afseq, also known as nerdo-rhythm, is an experimental imperative-style music sequence generator engine.
It allows you to programmatically create music sequences either in plain Rust as library (static, compiled) or in Lua as a scripting engine (dynamic, interpreted). So it's also suitable for live coding music.
In addition to its imperative event generator approach, it also supports the creation of musical events using tidalcycle's mini-notation.
afseq is part of the afplay crates. This crate only deals with the generation of raw musical events. It does not generate audio. You must use an application with built-in support for afseq to use it.
afseq generates musical sequences using three distinct components, stages.
- Pattern: dynamic pulse train generator to define the rhythmical pattern.
- Gate: optional pulse train filter between pattern and emitter.
- Emitter: dynamic note or parameter value generator which gets triggered by the pattern.
By separating the rhythmical pattern from the tonal part of a musical sequence, each part of a sequence can be freely modified, composed and (re)combined.
Read the Scripting Book. It contains an introduction, guides, full Lua API documentation and a few script examples.
The Rust backend uses standard Rust documentation features. The docs are currently not hosted online, but you can generate them locally via cargo doc --open.
See examples/play.rs for an example using only Rust: it defines and plays a little music thing. The content can only be changed at compile time.
See examples/play-script.rs for an example using the Lua API: it also defines and plays a little music thing, but its content can be added/removed and changed on the fly to do some basic live music hacking.
Thanks to unlessgames for adding the Tidal Cycles mini-notation to afseq.
Patches are welcome! Please fork the latest git repository and create a feature or bugfix branch.
afseq is distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License V3.