Software Engineering

Steve Reich’s Clapping Music with Akka

Using functions to express musical ideas is nothing new: Harmony, time signatures, the relations between notes in a scale and musical form all have their roots in mathematics, and composers have used mathematical abstractions for millennia (see Pythagorean Tuning for a 2500-year-old example). These abstractions, however, are not always obvious from they way that music is written down, leading to a potential disconnect between composer and performer. In this post, we will use Steve Reich’s 1972 Clapping Music to show how functional programming can be used to capture an underlying musical idea.