[xpointer]

I first made the language (fifteen years ago!) out of curiosity about esolangs and as a first try at writing a compiler. And for fun, yes. Since then, I've written more about multicoding -- the way two readings of code impact each other -- and thought more about the music that results (some links in my comment below). This is the aspect of the language that interests me now.

I chose MIDI since it's a standard and leaves to the programmer the choice of tool to compose the program. There's an IDE in the works geared for live performance of the language (that will not be MIDI, but not ready to say yet how it will work; it has the same lexicon but is quite a different language in practice).

[Rochus]

I see, thanks. But is Velato actually conceived to create music, or is the music just a "random" byproduct?

[velcrovan]

From the top of the original link:

> “Velato offers an unusual challenge to programmer-musicians: to compose a musical piece that, in addition to expressing their aims musically, fills the constraints necessary to compile to a working Velato program.”

It seems like Velato’s purpose is to provide an unusual and interesting creative constraint for people who can both code and write music.