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Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

sonic-pi.net

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#21

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 inte…

I would say it is for musicians who want to compose music with code.

When you delve into the world of electronic music, there are quite a few using such tools, doing live coding performances on their concerts.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#22

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…

I think the relative lack of a strong community around programmable music generation probably originates from a lack of a particularly good use case. To me, as both a programmer and an electronic music producer, applications like Sonic Pi and Supercollider are not all that appealing, and actually come off as downright tedious.

First of all, music creation is too chaotic a process to allow for simply getting things right on the first try. Single notes in arpeggios are changed, entire progressions are taken up and down steps, parameters are continuously played with until you find the right levels, and all of these and more are much better suited to graphical abstraction purely for ease of use. I'd much rather spin a virtual knob to find appropriate levels than type and re-type a variable quantity, especially if I have to wait for that quantity to update every time.

Second, music is all about edge cases. Using control flows to automatically change a piece is nice, but not as nice as quickly rearranging tracks in a visual playlist. Deciding that a particular loop should end in a different way is simple in a visual editor: cut off the tail and put something else in, or make one instance of the loop separate from the others and edit in place. These are processes that take less than a second for me, but would involve careful crafting of conditionals to achieve in Sonic Pi or the like.

All of that said, I think this approach probably has its merits. I've been wishing for scripting in DAWs for a long time, and having a synthesizer that supports writing code to modify waveforms or change how parameters link would be awesome (if this exists, someone please tell me). Projects like Sonic Pi, though, seem to take this past the point of usability.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have a much longer comment above that addresses your point, I think. The gist is this: programming music, as compared to using a graphical DAW, is highly tedious. Unless you know exactly what you want, down to the note, writing music in code would take far longer to produce results.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#24
post #21

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 inte…

I would say it is for musicians who want to compose music with code. When you delve into the world of electronic music, there are quite a few using such tools, doing live coding performances on their concerts.

For those that are interested, a few of these projects are: csound, Pure Data and Overtone.

I believe there are commercial options, as well, but I'm not familiar with them.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#25

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…

I think the relative lack of a strong community around programmable music generation probably originates from a lack of a particularly good use case. To me, as both a programmer and an electronic music producer, applications like Sonic Pi and Supercollider are not all that appealing, and actually come off as downright tedious. First of all, music creation is too chaotic a process to allow for simply getting things ri…

>> "I've been wishing for scripting in DAWs for a long time, and having a synthesizer that supports writing code to modify waveforms or change how parameters link would be awesome (if this exists, someone please tell me). Projects like Sonic Pi, though, seem to take this past the point of usability."

Reaper has a scripting language. It even comes with a few synths written in it, complete with source.

I want a DAW with the flexibility of Reaper and the UX of Ableton.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have a much longer comment above that addresses your point, I think. The gist is this: programming music, as compared to using a graphical DAW, is highly tedious. Unless you know exactly what you want, down to the note, writing music in code would take far longer to produce results.

interesting point

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#27

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 inte…

It might be useful to divide the wold in neat venn diagrams of "target audiences" when you are running a business, but it is not good to start taking this stuff too seriously. There's more to life than that.

We are humans beings and we like to create. The digital computer is a meta-tool, in the sense that it is possible to invent entire new mediums of expression within it. This appears to be a particularly interesting one. I think you underestimate kids. I know I would be very excited to have access to this tool back in the day, and would be delighted to be able to use randomness to manipulate sound. Being called a "superhuman musician" for pressing a button would make me want to puke.

Take your PM hat off sometimes and smell the roses.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it is for musicians who want to compose music with code. When you delve into the world of electronic music, there are quite a few using such tools, doing live coding performances on their concerts.

For those that are interested, a few of these projects are: csound, Pure Data and Overtone. I believe there are commercial options, as well, but I'm not familiar with them.

@pjmlp thanks for clarifying. I had no idea there was such a thing.

@darpa_escapee - thanks for guiding me into that rabbit hole. Csound looked the most promising to me. Pure Data needs more screenshot and samples, the site was very hard for me to dive through and Overtone Clojure it's cool. Wanted to learn that at one point, but I'm sticking first with learning Haskell.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#29

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 inte…

By your own argument, this is obviously not primarily intended to teach coding.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#30

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 inte…

One of the problems that the Ruby community seems to have focused on is bridging the gap between code and ideas. I say this as a non-Ruby-programmer.

At the end of the day, computers simply read language and convert that into some basic operations. But still, the average non programmer feels like software is this black box of mystery which takes years to comprehend. And that's not true!

I know plenty of people programming synth's on Ableton, mostly using their mouse to point and drag. And I suspect a lot of them suffer from 'click and drag fatigue'. Most of them would be able understand all of the parameters being exposed here.

Helping bring practical programming to non-programmers is a noble goal. And I hope they succeed... because what programmers want to keep re-writing the same boilerplate for the next 20 years?

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