Description

Sonny is a functional programming language designed to create music and other sounds. It features a highly modular, fully programmable sound generation and transformation pipeline so that the user has complete control over what is generated.

Important Note

Sonny is not currently undergoing any new development. I have found that there is a fundamental problem with using an interpretted language to process audio: it is far too slow. You may be interested in a more recent music programming project of mine: Ryvm.

Features

Current Features

Standard programming language expression evaluation including arithmetic, logical, and ternary operators
Modular arithmetic sound transformation via function-like constructs called "chains"
Easy-to-type note entry to build song loops
Song loop arrangement via chains
Frequency-domain sound manipulation (not perfect)
Simple but effective module system for separating code into multiple files or libraries
Compiles to .WAV format

Originally Planned Features (likely never going to happen)

Output to other audio formats, namely .MP3 and .OGG
Playback and manipulation of external audio samples
A more powerful module system for more complex libraries
Continuous sound playback from the compiler itself
Proper language documentation (currently there is only a lackluster grammar file)
Getting user input to allow for interactive programs
A decent standard library with lots of useful chains

Design Goals

Goals

The language should (eventually)...

be capable of creating any audio file that a typical DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) program like Ableton, Reason, or Logic are capable of making.
be easy to use for the purposes of sound design and audio generation.
be fast. A decent machine should be capable of continuous audio generation and playback without any pauses.
have simple, nice-looking syntax. (This is obviously subjective.)
be compatible with all major desktop operating systems.
not require a GUI for the vast majority of features.

Non-Goals

The does not need to, and probably should not...

be easy to use as a general-purpose programming language. There are plenty of very good general-purpose programming languages already. Sonny only seeks to be good in its niche of sound processing.

Installation

Requirements

Git (recommended)
Rust
Cargo

The Sonny compiler is written in the Rust programming language. Currently, the main way to install Sonny is to build it from source. Luckily, Rust makes this very easy. Before you can install Sonny you will need to install Rust and its package manager, cargo.

If you do not already have Rust installed, head over to the Rust website and install it. Once cargo is installed, simply run these commands in your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/kaikalii/sonny.git
cd sonny
cargo build --release

Then, you can run the example:

cargo run example.son --play

After this, you can cargo build --release and add /PATH/TO/sonny/target/release to your path if you want to be able to compile Sonny projects from any directory.

If you use Atom as your editor, you can get syntax highlighting for Sonny by installing the language-sonny package.

Documentation

To learn the basics or programming in Sonny, head over to the documentation.

Contributing

Any contribution to Sonny's development is greatly appreciated. If you would like to contribute, please keep the following in mind:

Unless your contribution is a simple bug fix, open an issue to discuss it before submitting a pull-request.
Please use rustfmt on your code with the default settings.