[ANN] bach 0.8.1 released (+ cage and dada!)

The brand new version 0.8.1 of bach:automated composer’s helper, a Max package for musical representation and computer-aided composition, has just been released on the Max Package Manager.

In spite of the version number, many things have been added to bach, and many have changed with respect to v0.8.0 and even more so to v0.7.9. For a start, bach has become an open source project, released under the GPL-v3 license. We have also started a Patreon page, as we really want to keep developing and maintaining bach, but the project has become increasingly large and our lives increasingly busy. So, if you use bach, please consider becoming one of our patrons: you’ll get nice benefits in exchange!

Content-wise, the changes are so many that it’s impossible to list them all here: improved stability, improved graphics, improved slots, improved support for MusicXML files, a new, rich syntax for displaying and manipulating dynamics, and much more. For a more comprehensive list, you can refer to the “What’s new” tab in the “bach.overview” patch accessible from Max’s Extras menu.

If we had to pick one thing among all this new stuff, we’d probably choose the bach.eval object, which is something you can’t really define it in two words: it can assemble complex lists without a constellation of triggers, message boxes and pack-like objects; share values in flexible and complex ways; implement rich conditionals; and, all in all, express virtually any process in a small but powerful programming language named bell and conceived specifically with Max and bach in mind.

If you come from bach 0.7.9, another notable addition is the new pitch data type, which allows to manipulate concepts such as “Eb4” (distinct from “D#4”) or “Diminished fifth + 1/23 of a tone” in a semantically and mathematically meaningful way. All the modules treating musical pitches (such as bach.score and bach.tonnetz) and all the modules doing maths (such as bach.+ and bach.minmax) accept and operate upon the pitch data type.

Last but not least, this bach release comes along with a new release of the cage package (our collection of utility abstractions for computer-aided and algorithmic composition), with lots of fixes and new features and a loving dedication to the late Éric Daubresse who was the very initiator of the project, and the first cross-platform release of Daniele Ghisi’s dada package, a set of non-standard tools and graphical user interfaces for composition. For more info about all this, you can as usual check out www.bachproject.net.

We really hope that you’ll enjoy this new release as much as we do, and we look forward for your feedback!

The bach team—andrea & daniele