The purpose of Mauve is to provide a command line and text editor substitute for graphical music applications - it is a language for making music.
Use make and make play to compile the program, build the example audio, and play.
p changes the pitch - takes one base 12 argument, in which 0 is A, and b is G#. The pitch will move to the nearest A, B#, E, F, Gb. If there are six half-steps between the current pitch and the specified pitch, the pitch will move to the pitch above.
po will move the pitch up or down an octave - takes + or -.
al and rl specify attack length and release length - the larger the attack length, the more gradual the onset.
v takes a float between 0 and 1, and sets the volume.
w will cause a note to play. Its argument is the length of the note.
defmacro [name] - macros are defined at the end of the string. The name must not contain whitespace. They are preprocessed (just string replacement) with usemacro [name].