-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Home
xen is a high-level, interpreted language for analyzing and operating upon musical pitch structures within the context of "xenharmonic" microtonal theory. The interpreter is written in ES6 JavaScript and based off "AEL" by Peter Olson. xen is heavily reliant on tune.js, a library which models the xen data types as classes in JavaScript/TypeScript.
This Wiki contains the documentation for the xen language. I also recorded a series of videos that serves as a helpful introduction.
The online xen console includes the interpreter and can be used to evaluate expressions, like a sort of xenharmonic calculator.
xen contains 6 main data types, with special syntax to identify them:
| type | example |
|---|---|
et |
4#12 |
ratio |
9:8 |
freq |
300hz |
cents |
40c |
number |
1.10 |
list |
'(1, 2, 3, 4) |
Generally, math may be performed freely between all types
using arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %). xen handles the
type conversions automatically behind the scenes.
N.B. most operators work in pitch space. For example, adding
intervals corresponds to "stacking" them, no matter if they
are frequency ratios or et (equal-tempered) intervals.
The function play() may be used to play back notes, intervals,
or even lists of intervals & interval structures such as 4:5:6:7.
xen also includes functions for analysis, such as closest(), which
finds the closest et intervals for a given ratio and the closest
ratios for a given et interval.
xen is case-insensitive.