What bach brings
Music notation
Reactive paradigm
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Developing and maintaining bach is a lot of work. We have decided to keep bach free and embrace a business model based on Patreon: how much do you consider bach is valuable for you? If the answer is 0$, or if you cannot afford to pay any price, that's totally fine - we completely understand. But if you can afford to pay us as little as a cup of coffee per month, that would really help. In addition to keeping bach accessible for everybody, you'll also have exclusive access to prereleases, video tutorials, and more.
Why use bach
Free and open source
We can afford to keep bach free thanks to the generous donations of our supporters on Patreon. If you find bach useful, please consider becoming a patron.
Cross platform
Powerful data types
Some numbers about bach
What you can do with bach
Composition
Live notation
Education
Augmented sequencers
Synthesis
Video and lighting
Constraint programming
Analysis
Metascores
The bach family
bach is the forefather of the family. It contains all the basic modules to deal with computer-aided composition in Max. It’s the first and library you should download, since all the other members of the family won’t even start working without bach.
cage contains ready-to-use modules to deal with many standard 20th- and 21th-century compositional techniques. It is library designed for musicians: you will only deal with musically meaningful parameters, without even worrying about lower-level implementation.
Because of this, cage is easier to deal with than bach; if visual programming with bach makes you nervous, you should definitely consider installing cage and give it a try.
dada is the newest member of the bach family: it contains non-standard graphical user interface for music generation and processing. dada is by design an open box: it is to bach what a laboratory is to a library. All of its components embrace a graphic, ludic, explorative approach to music; most of its components also refer to the worlds of plane geometry, physical modeling or recreational mathematics.
ears deals with off-line algorithmic audio and contains a large set of modules to operate on buffers, including treatments, analysis and synthesis.
Projects
From The Machine: Volume 1
From The Machine, Volume 1 is a the first in a series of albums from composers Joseph Branciforte & Kenneth Kirschner that explores the application of software-based compositional techniques — […]
Comprovisador
Comprovisador is a system designed by Pedro Louzeiro to enable mediated soloist-ensemble interaction using machine listening, algorithmic compositional procedures and dynamic notation, in a networked environment. In real-time, as a soloist […]
MOZ’Lib
MOZ’Lib is a set of pedagogical tools developed by composer Julien Vincenot, designed to explore musical writing, creation and computer programming. It constitutes an easy introduction to the vast domain […]
bach with Antescofo
Jonathan Bell uses bach.score as a tool for representing a melody which the computer tracks or follows, as well as for storing and displaying the actions to be made when […]
Sirens Cycle
Since his first quartet Korrespondenz (1992), Peter Eötvös has been interested in the transcription of phonetic elements to music, in order to make instruments speak. For Sirens Cycle, Eötvös’s latest […]
The SmartVox Project
Jonathan Bell’s piece Au Commencement was entirely composed (and delivered to the singers) with the help of the bach.roll space-time notation environment. The SmartVox project uses filmed sequences (mp4) of […]
my mother used to say
my mother used to say (2016) is a 10 minutes piece in three movements for fans and electromagnetic fields, by Amos Cappuccio. Here are Amos Cappuccio’s words about his work: […]
Three pieces. Catabasis I, II, III
Diego Dall’Osto’s “Three pieces. Catabasis I, II, III”, for violin and live audio-video electronics (2015), use bach and cage libraries both for computer assisted composition and for synthesis and performance […]
picture2score
Takuya Shimizu has developed tools to make orchestral scores from pictures by using bach in combination with Jitter. Within bach, one can individually set the color of each notehead in […]
Instant Ensemble
Nikola Kołodziejczyk’s Instant Ensemble is a response to predictable and repeatable music tours. Sheet music for each concert of the seven-piece band is created live literally in front of the […]
An Experiment with Time
Daniele Ghisi’s An Experiment with Time (2015), is both a 3-screens multimedia installation and a live piece for ensemble, video and electronics. This work inspired by the eponym book by […]
Laws of Fives
Seth Shafer’s Law of Fives (2015), for viola, bass clarinet, marimba, and computer, uses real-time notation and requires the performers to sight-read music as it is algorithmically generated during the […]
mymelody tsukurukun
mymelody tsukurukun is Takuya Shumizu’s tool to generate melodies by indicating a degree of complexity. Users input a time series of complexity (each value being between 0 and 1000), and […]
Orchids
bach, cage and dada are throroughly used in Ircam’s Orchids project, as interface tools for the automatic orchestration engine. More information here.
Credits
bach is an independent project by composers Andrea Agostini and Daniele Ghisi.
It is supported by our wonderful community on Patreon. Click on a the message [; bach donors] in Max in order to have a list of all our patrons. It used to be also supporters by individual donations on Paypal; our top supporters (100+€) have been: Dimitri Fergadis, Pete Kellock.
The authors wish to thank: Sara Adhitya, Carlos Agon, Davide Bordogna, DaFact, Arshia Cont, Eric Daubresse, Gianluca Delfino, Phil Gaskill, Eric Grunin, Emmanuel Jourdan, Mika Kuuskankare, Serge Lemouton, Jean Lochard, Mikhail Malt, Andrew Pask, Andrea Rota, Andrea Sarto, and all the people at IRCAM who have supported and encouraged the work, although not an internal IRCAM project.
bach includes the Kiss FFT library (distributed under BSD licence), the Mini-XML library (distributed under LGPLv2.0 license) and the IRCAM SDIF library (distributed under LGPLv2.1 license).
The official bach font is "November for bach", created by Robert Piéchaud and automatically loaded at bach startup. "November for bach" is a light version of the famous November font. The full November font covers a wide range of music symbols, from Renaissance to the XXI century, and gives a unique, warm and lively look to your music scores. It is fully compatible with Finale, Sibelius and other notation softwares, and, in addition, is the first commercial music font fully compliant with SMUFL. You can purchase November from here.
cage is a research project by Andrea Agostini and Daniele Ghisi, carried out at the electroacoustic music center of the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève, supported by the music and art division of the Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale.
dada is part of Daniele Ghisi's PhD project, supported by UPMC, CNRS, IRCAM (STMS Lab) and Sorbonne.
ears is a project by Daniele Ghisi with contributions from Andrea Agostini.