Live coding (music) with Emacs Live | Hacker News Reader

Live coding (music) with Emacs Live

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58 pointsmattrepl16 comments

Anyone interested in this should also check out ChucK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChucK

Thanks for this! Did not know about ChucK.

Since we're plugging stuff we like, ChucK co-author Perry Cook's book, here: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Sound-Synthesis-Interactive-Appli... is an excellent intro to DSP and synthesis techniques.

I actually thought the screenshots are quite interesting with their scanline glitz, but apparently that's from postprocessing.

Yes, I was thinking it'd be fun to be able to switch Emacs into that mode at times. No doubt it'd drive you crazy if you used it too long though...

I think I've seen an Emacs video using the same "fake old retro" scanline look but I'm not sure how it was made. Could have been postprocessed on the whole video too.

Does anyone know how this effect was achieved?

After effects can do this easily:

For the glow: duplicate the video layer, add a fast blur effect and set it to overlay or color dodge blending mode.

For the scanlines: AFX has a scanlines/cathode effect that you can tweak to re-create that look. I can't recall off the top of my head how it's done, but I can look it up if you'd like (I've done it before, while fucking around in AFX [1]).

[1]: https://vimeo.com/41453548

I don't think OP actually wants to know how he can do that with post-processing, but in a real Emacs session.

Not sure if you can get that specific effect, but Cathode for Mac has lots of options:

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

The author talked to the Cathode developer and even opened a feature request for iTerm2[1]. There seems to be some interest in this. Cathode is mostly about emulating old, slow hardware, this would be about the opposite (code wouldn't look too differently, though). A "movie hacker" terminal or editor for live coding would be pretty interesting. Hmm, maybe in addition to Xt/Gtk/OSX one could add an OpenGL interface to Emacs for maximum scriptability.

1: https://vimeo.com/22798433

I've just ported the theme to Emacs 24 [1] custom-theme.el and made the same realization.

[1] : https://gist.github.com/3723433

Sam Aaron, the guy who has done a bunch of screencasts with Overtone (and his emacs/dvtm config), and used it to create this emacs config setup, has used the same effect on pretty much everything. It really does add an element of coolness to the mix.

I've been using emacs live for a bit. It's great. It bundles some nice plugins and has sane defaults. The cyberpunk colour scheme is cool. It has some nice personal touches on the scratch buffer.

The downside is that the structure puts far more emphasis on maintaining the structure than adapting your config. If you want to keep it solid you can't use package manager without some changes, or (configure-group).

You might get the odd issue with the bundled plugins (auto-complete loved lisp and file system traversal but hated other languages), but for a "I want to live code and I want it to WORK" config, it's bloody good.

Another similar project, SuperCollider: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net

And if you're on a Mac, Impromptu: http://impromptu.moso.com.au

Emacs Live uses Overtone which is a Clojure layer over SuperCollider.

oh i like, how does this compare to pd and max/msp, apart from the fact that those are visual.

it seems that the overtone guys want to add a visual display in the future. but most comparisions of supercollider and max/msp are mainly focused on the frontend.

is there anything i can do with max that i can't with sc besides looking pretty? (although i do prefer a nice editor to a visual thingie)

Where can one get information about how to actually code with this? The videos sure are fancy, but don't offer much information.

It's worth noting you can also use vimclojure as a live Overtone environment. (or other slime-y vim methods)

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