Programming Music with Overtone | Hacker News Reader

Programming Music with Overtone

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better video, 4 minutes, no crappy foreplay, just some guy live-coding with overtone

http://vimeo.com/22798433

That's the same guy - me :-)

Love the minimalist phasing at the end.

Very nice video. I've played with Overtone and it's a lot of fun. This reminds me to get back into it more.

Awesome talk! I see you are located in Cambridge, are you going to give a talk/demo there anytime soon?

It's not "crappy foreplay" - it's a presentation.

I feel like I miss out on a lot of interesting talk videos because I simply cannot stand this kind of phone-camera-in-the-audience execution. I can barely hear these people's muffled voices over the sound of the background hiss.

I mean, someone took the time to put beginning music and titles on this, so why not actually, you know, mic the speaker?

I did have a microphone attached to me - but for some reason they didn't go with that audio-stream. I agree, it's a little difficult to follow for the first couple of minutes - but it does get better.

but for some reason they didn't go with that audio-stream

Wait, what? I really looked forward to this one since I read the slides when they appeared. Then i watched a portion of the talk and skipped to your exciting demos, because I couldn't understand anything you said.

Is there any possibility to get a new video with the other stream?

I listened to this right through over laptop speakers and heard every word without problems. Perhaps you're just not used to Sam's English accent?

Yes, that's a problem too.

What bothers me is that Java does not have good, free, well documented, well maintained libraries for low-latency (5 ms or less) audio and MIDI.

Still have to resort to C++ if I'm going to build audio software for music production and innovation.

have you looked into pd? http://puredata.info/

...... if you can link it in clojure, you can link it in java.

I love music programming, my first open source projects, Melopy [1] tried to accomplish this in a really approachable way. Unfortunately I'm still new to the open-source world and I don't know nearly enough about music ;)

[1] http://github.com/prezjordan/Melopy

This was a great presentation. I'm not really that into programming music, but I really enjoyed the speaker's presentation style and the content was very interesting and enjoyable.

I've been learning SuperCollider for a month or so. It's a weird but very interesting and powerful language. Got some of the nice elements of Ruby : lambda functions, live coding, etc. with realtime goodness.

Overtone is a Clojure port of SC, but since I don't know Clojure, I chose to learn SC language directly (and the community is very good).

Would love to have a Ruby port of SC though!

I feel like it's worth pointing out the distinction between SuperCollider the programming language and SuperCollider the audio synthesis server. The audio server is stand-alone and can be controlled via Open Sound Control. The language is a music DSL that abstracts over the OSC messages and acts as a client to the synth server. Overtone is another client to the synth server, but I'm not sure how much it's following the SuperCollider language. Also, there's an scruby project https://github.com/maca/scruby .

You're right, and in Overtone we haven't really tried to mirror SCLang at all. The DSP core of scsynth is a great piece of software with many years of testing, debugging, and extension, so it's wonderful that we can leverage this externally by just sending OSC. Of course we want to pull in any good ideas we find from the sc class library or any other music system, but generally we have been working on creating an expressive synthesis language that clearly communicates what is being produced. In SCLang there are many syntactic tricks and shortcuts which allow you to create very terse definitions, but they are often to the detriment of readability. With Clojure's lazy sequences we can easily model many interesting types of generative musical structures, and with easy access to the JVM ecosystem of libraries we can now control our musical processes with external tools or devices, visualize them with nice graphics, auralize external phenomena (e.g. people have hooked into automated build/test systems), etc., far easier than in SClang.

Is it possible to use overtone to send midi to an external hardware device?

Absolutely. We have a built in midi library for communicating with hardware midi devices.

SupderCollider is a lot of fun, though I've been getting more and more interested in overtone lately, especially because by using a more general purpose language you can avoid some of the quirks that make writing code in SuperCollider occasionally tedious. Things like needing to recompile the whole class library every time you write or modify a class, or the lack of third party code on par with an environment like Clojure. I also feel like the functional approach and Lisp-style macros lend themselves quite well to the task.

The nice thing, of course, is that since the synthesis server and language are decoupled, you're not limited to one client or the other, and in theory even the synthdefs you compile in one client can be loaded and manipulated from another. Rohan Drape has done some work on Haskell (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/SuperCollider) and Scheme (http://slavepianos.org/rd/r/d/darcsweb.cgi?r=rsc3) clients as well.

http://vimeo.com/2503257

Unwatchable because of the terrible audio. That echo is deafening.

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