[mlangdon]

I've done a lot with Pd and enjoyed the noise-making aspects. I find the composition orientation of Alda appealing, but I would want to be able to pipe in sound from something like a Pd. Any of the above inhabit this middle zone?

I particularly like the idea of visual flow programming for synthesis and markup with control flow for composition.

[zebproj]

Alda does MIDI out, so you could probably route Alda to PD (PD is really good at handling MIDI signals).

While not graphical like PD, several musical languages make a distinction between the sound design (signal flow and modules) and events (notes, etc).

Csound is the first to come to mind, with it's MUSIC N orchestra + score paradigm. The orchestra syntax (especially the new changes in csound6) lends itself nicely to expressive sound design. Scores, however, are tedious to write by hand. Most Csounders opt to generate these using another program (which in itself is pretty cool, IMO)

ChucK does a similar thing as well, where you can write the signal chain (oscillator => filter => dac) and then you can control it using ChucK's C-like syntax. If you are interested in algorithmic composition and have a stronger background in programming, this is a pretty fun language to work in. That being said, Csound has a much better collection of sound modules.

Not exactly the answer you were looking for, but I hope you can check them both out, as they offer different approaches to computer music composition.

[mlangdon]

This was exactly what I was looking for. A survey of the available options.

I looked at supercollider before you answered and found the syntax kind of attractive. Sort of scala-ish, though maybe I am misremembering Scala from that one programming test.

[zebproj]

Supercollider is a popular choice! If you're interesting more of a survey, I wrote a blog post a few months ago where I compared music languages by writing the same sound in each one:

https://www.safaribooksonline.com/blog/2014/11/07/making-com...