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Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

sonic-pi.net

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#14

i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented. my impression is that this is coming up ever…

Yea thats a problem for all of the most popular livecoding libs (tidal and sonic pi depend on supercollider). One alternative is to use js (gibber.js) and doing livecoding in the browser. I've been playing with the idea of creating this lib that uses ruby and compiles to js under the hood: https://github.com/merongivian/negasonic, one drawback is performance though

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#15

i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented. my impression is that this is coming up ever…

There's also Tidal: https://tidalcycles.org/

Here's a live coding video from its front page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLybSFICi4UliK17U6rxPneXA...

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#16
I played with sonicpi for a while and it was fun until I hit the limitations of my severely lacking music theory knowledge.

I feel like all the best tutorials are written for people who are good with music but need to learn to code. Anyone out there have any good resources for using sonicpi to learn more music theory as a coder?

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#17

i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented. my impression is that this is coming up ever…

Music coding is conceptually challenging, which immediately limits the community of interest to people who like coding for its own sake, and not usually very rewarding musically, which limits the community further to academics, students who are forced to experiment with code (usually briefly), and the odd hobby experimentalist.

Given all the other tools available, from DAWS to trackers to VSTs to hardware synths, why would a musician - as opposed to a coder - want to climb the incredibly steep learning curve?

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#18

i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented. my impression is that this is coming up ever…

Music coding is conceptually challenging, which immediately limits the community of interest to people who like coding for its own sake, and not usually very rewarding musically, which limits the community further to academics, students who are forced to experiment with code (usually briefly), and the odd hobby experimentalist. Given all the other tools available, from DAWS to trackers to VSTs to hardware synths, why…

interesting that you come forward with music resulting from this approach as not being very rewarding. but why is that so? I'm not a musician, so maybe I'm naive - but shouldn't music programming be able to produce anything and beyond?

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#19
At first glance this looks very cool. There is a lot of good documentations and it seems like a powerful set of libraries around it to make something very neat.

BUT...to put my PM hat on, I'm not sure who is the target audience here?

A - musicians who want to compose music with code. B - people who want to learn programming by having fun with music creation. C - programmers who want to learn music theory.

If the intention is a fun vehicle to to teach programming, then I think there are better ways. I looked thought the samples and I think as a kid I would get tired very quickly. There are so many function calls to learn. Right away I have to understand the concept of random and what it does.

I think if the idea is to empower musicians, this seems like a lot of work to create music.

At the end, you have to know some music principle and already understand a lot of different programming concepts to actually do anything.

This combination makes doing programming dependent on knowing music theory and creating music knowing a lot of programming and exploring all the different functions and libraries to then apply your music theory to.

To me it would be frustrating. And for musicians who I guess, can potentially create some sounds that might be difficult with existing tools, just to hard to do.

It would have been far better to have a simple 2D game board (tanks, robots, etc. I know it's been done) as a programing tool than inside a complex world of music theory.

Or at least make the libraries not dependent on music theory and provided some higher level presets with built in abstractions. Example: loop song(type: techno_beat, length:300) (do some stuff here) end_loop

Make the user feel like superhuman musicians.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#20

Prior to my career as a software engineer, I attended RubyConf (2015, San Antonio) and watched a presentation about making music with Sonic Pi. That night, I made this rendition of "Corridors of Time" from Chrono Trigger: https://gist.github.com/thisismitch/be9287c80903cad151fe It took me way longer than I'd like to admit! Enjoy! Edit: Here's an MP3 export of it https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-anicas-project/corridor…

Well done! Was this project one of your introductions into programming?
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