Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools • Hacker News Board

Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#1

Post by samaaron » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 4:11 PM UTC

Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools
sonic-pi.net

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#2

Post by catshirt » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 8:32 PM UTC

really cool.

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.

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#3

Post by gracenotes » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 9:27 PM UTC

There was a talk at Strange Loop 2014, "Our Shared Joy of Programming", which was just recently put on YouTube:

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.

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#4

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

For a long long time I have wanted to do a language for programming music. I like how easy this is to get started with it almost feels like the old tracker days.

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#5

Post by dmoo » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

Also have a look at http://earsketch.gatech.edu

Python + music

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#6

Post by zalmoxes » Sat, Sep 20, 2014, 10:18 PM UTC

Not bad. Reminds me of Hackety Hack.

Bret Victor's criticism of KhanAcademy is just as relevant here http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Re: Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

#7

Post by glial » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 3:48 AM UTC

This is great. As someone who's tried to get into coded music, the biggest hurdle for me has always been getting the pipeline set up properly (including learning VIM commands). This handles all of that.