Dr. Paul Hudak at Yale developed the course and textbook
"Haskell School of Music: From Signals to Symphonies",
along with a (general purpose) MIDI-backed music library Euterpea and a
book-specific example library HSoM to teach haskell and music processing.
The book is currently undergoing review for formal publication. As of this writing (May 2018), there's an older version available for free from the Yale CS website
Links:
- Euterpea homepage
- Download instructions
- Euterpea (library on hackage
- Euterpea docs
- HSoM (library on hackage
- HSoM docs
Haskell has a reputation among programmers for being quite difficult.
If you are coming to programming for the first time, learning your first language is always challenging. I would actually argue that Haskell isn't much harder for beginners than other languages; it's certainly easier to pick up than C (which is used, for example, in Harvard's intro CS50 course).
For an absolute beginner, many intro haskell resources, such as the freely available Learn You a Haskell for Great Good should prove useful enough to get you going on Haskell School of Music.
For programmers who are experienced in other languages, Haskell can be frustrating to learn. It's different enough that for a while you feel like a beginner again. And getting "over the hump" for knowing how to make real projects, rather than just toys, can be difficult because
- The level of type abstraction in haskell libraries is much higher than in the libraries of most other ecosystems
- In day-to-day work (much more so than toy projects) most of what we do
involves interacting with other systems, so you very quickly have to know
something about
IO, and often monad transformers as well, to stand up actual microservices in Haskell
If you're hoping to learn haskell and also understand how to build real-world tools in it, I highly recommend investing in the book Haskell Programming from First Principles which is an extensively beta-tested book for teaching not only the langauge but also patterns of haskell development.
This repo is a work in progress, and from past experience it's likely to never be finished. Here are modules thus far:
The install instructions for Euterpea rely on a global cabal setup, which is not the preferred way for modern haskell development to work.
In the Chapter 0 readme, I walk through how to create a stack project
(stack is the currently dominant user-facing build tool for Haskell) and
add Euterpea as a project dependency.
By the end of it, you should be able to make music using modern, production haskell build tools. It doens't cover any actual theory, it's just about making the tech fit together.
There's not much here because Chapter 1 is mostly an overview of Haskell
syntax / intro to programming concepts. I did work through a few small
examples in src/Lib.hs, and added some notes in the README about how to
use ghci to play with the examples.