Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools
sonic-pi.net
sonic-pi.net
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0
The whole talk is stimulating, but the parts relevant to Sonic Pi are its Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/) lineage at about 9:05, a demo at about 17:36, and the experience using it in schools (http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/) at about 26:48.
What I got out of it was that it's a language which is meant to be both fully featured and easy for kids to pick up, to get interested in music, programming, or both. Maybe not so much programming as just "computational thinking". It has less incidental complexity than EDSLs (like Overtone) or traditional tools which expose more of the synthesis pipeline. Compared to most video game/graphics frameworks, which are also used in education, you can get to more polished content faster.
nested with_synth and with_fx calls seem less intuitive than an object oriented approach, which mirror traditional circuits. (synth.connect(fx1) fx1.connect(output)). what was the reasoning behind this? i only ask because i could see it making a difference in terms of education. and, what makes this more suitable for schools than ChucK, Supercollider, etc.?
that aside, i really wish someone would make a language agnostic livecoding VST so we can start incorporating stuff like Sonic Pi into our real workflows. i sense an integration like that would also gain some attention from people who previously ignored livecoding. i'm sure a lot of students screw around with Fruity Loops or Ableton and would find livecoding much more accessible if it tapped into the tooling they already understood.
It's just a pity it's not cheap (around $700 to $800 for Live Studio with Max). I can see this hampering it's potential as an education tool outside of anything but specialist audio training organizations.
EDIT: I completely forgot about SynthEdit (http://www.synthedit.com/). It can export VSTs.
Live coding systems are only really good for building teeny tiny little toy automata, which usually do simple stuff with note lists, and maybe apply a bit of randomness or some simple repeating functions to a parameter or five.
Weapons-grade commercial music is much more complicated. The sounds are richer, the arrangements and mixes are immensely complex (even for simple songs), and generally there's a ridiculous amount of care and detail.
But... if you start building in machine learning, database searches, and super-complex DSP patches, and the stuff you really need to make non-trivial music, you're not really live coding any more - you're plugging pre-existing modules and data together by typing.
Also, watching people typing is kind of dull.
I think there are solutions to both problems, but REPL-music systems are only ever going to be a step on the way to them.
I'd be surprised if live coding ever makes it into the mainstream in the way that (say) eSports almost have.
As for 'minimal music' - most of it isn't really all that minimal, and it certainly can't be reduced to trivial algos.
And if your only option is to be minimal, maybe that's not so great.
Point is that only a tiny subset of the population has ever been interested in listening to music defined and created exclusively by writing code. Live coding caters very nicely to them.
No one else seems to be listening.
Over the same period, CGI has moved from basic wireframes to epic photorealism-with-AI. You can see this stuff in games and movies, and it's awesome.
Why aren't code musicians interested in pushing the boundaries of code music by aiming for something with similar complexity?
Here's a thing: after nearly sixty years of code music, exactly zero code music composers have troubled the public imagination.
Over the same period we've had literally hundreds of new electronic genres and styles, and even people who don't much like electronica can name at least a couple of people who make it.
We've also had game music coders writing complex AIs for arranging and generating music on the fly in game contexts.
But live coders don't seem interested in any of this, because typing.
Honestly, this completely baffles me.
Well e.g. Autechre, Aphex Twin, BT and Holly Herndon work with code, and I'd say are pretty influential.
Improv is generally non-commercial due to the lack of end product, but we're seeing algoraves with hundreds of people turning up and having fun. It's still developing but is promising and we've seen some nice successes. Maybe there are live coding performances/situations you haven't experienced yet..
Also I particularly enjoy collaboration with live musicians, that's where the various trade offs play off each other and become something else.
because there is no reason, because livecoding hasn't matured at the same rate as other production software. at the risk of painting a broad stroke, the people who care about livecoding don't really care about rich sounds.
do you recall how EDM sounded in the 90s and early 2000s compared to now? and they were using the same exact tools as they use today. but i'm pretty sure a lot of techno producers were literally limited to like 6 tracks or something. and the sounds they used were god awful. not because they preferred it, but because they were technically limited by these parameters.
but people still made music, people still danced, and the genre progressed along with it's tooling over the next 20 years.
the music is still evolving side by side with the software we build to produce it. livecoding is just another instrument that hasn't been exploited to it's fullest advantage (as a "live" coding or a production tool).
i've played in touring bands, and i produce electronic music for fun now. i've been a software engineer about my whole life. i would love more programming language options in my production. the same way tweaking a VST can result in more interesting melodies than you originally intended, programming languages can be a great tool to help explore audio in unique ways.
A step on the way is far more productive than saying it is impossible and ignoring it.
There will be Bachs, Beethovens and Lennons of the REPL. First, they need their instruments.
Bret Victor's criticism of KhanAcademy is just as relevant here http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
Sonic Pi is just that the Turtle of music programming environments. It doesn't start with abstraction but with a ground in playability.
It feels like the PHP of music programming environments.
I am a former musician so approach music more like Sonic Pi
I mean it's this
Sonic Pi
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.2 do loop do play scale(:Eb2, :major_pentatonic, num_octaves: 3).choose, release: 0.1, amp: rand sleep 0.1 end end
vs. super collider
// Simple synth definition using the Atari2600 UGen: ( SynthDef(\atari2600, {|out= 0, gate= 1, tone0= 5, tone1= 8, freq0= 10, freq1= 20, amp= 1, pan= 0| var e, z; e= EnvGen.kr(Env.asr(0.01, amp, 0.05), gate, doneAction:2); z= Atari2600.ar(tone0, tone1, freq0, freq1, 15, 15); Out.ar(out, Pan2.ar(z*e, pan)); }).store )
// And a pattern to play it: ( Pbind( \instrument, \atari2600, \dur, Pseq([0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.45], inf), \amp, 0.8, \tone0, Pseq([Pseq([2, 5], 32), Pseq([3, 5], 32)], inf), \tone1, 14, \freq0, Pseq([Pbrown(28, 31, 1, 32), Pbrown(23, 26, 3, 32)], inf), \freq1, Pseq([Pn(10, 16), Pn(11, 16)], inf) ).play )
When playing music the ability to quickly get up and running is more important than the flexibility of the system. I.e. you wanna quickly get to the point when you have fun and then you optimize later.
But don't get me wrong supercollider is a fantastic tool and was a real innovation.
Python + music
I'll experiment with the .tgz file for that.
Or build it yourself: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#...