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Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

sonic-pi.net

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#31

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…

The creator of sonic pi gave a keynote talk at my company's dev conference last month. He was pretty clear that it was originally created to help teach children programming. It does have other audiences now though.

He mentioned that he tried starting with simple games like you suggest but that kids have unrealistic expectations of what they'll be able to do and it leads to disappointment. They can imagine a commercial quality game quite easily but have no hope of creating one. But with music they're excited to be able to make any sound at all and don't expect to be able to create a film score.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#32

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

Having tried both Gibber.js and Tone.js I would give the edge to Tone.js - less crackles and pops and generally more a more stable bridge to the Web Audio Api. Give it a look if you like.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#33
post #31

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…

The creator of sonic pi gave a keynote talk at my company's dev conference last month. He was pretty clear that it was originally created to help teach children programming. It does have other audiences now though. He mentioned that he tried starting with simple games like you suggest but that kids have unrealistic expectations of what they'll be able to do and it leads to disappointment. They can imagine a commercia…

He mentioned that he tried starting with simple games like you suggest but that kids have unrealistic expectations of what they'll be able to do and it leads to disappointment.

Very interesting. I guess that could also make sense.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#34
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.

[deleted]

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#35
post #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 progra…

> 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.

As a Rubyist, I say this is pretty well on-the-mark. People ask me all the time why I love Ruby, why I think Ruby is the best language ever made, why I think in a thousand years, Ruby will have eaten all the other languages.

It's because at the end of the day, Ruby is a far more pleasing mental interface to software systems than anything else. If it's not Ruby we're all programming with in a thousand years, what language it is we are programming in, will look a lot like Ruby.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#36
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.

Max/MSP is a popular one, basically a fleshed-out commercial version of Pure Data. As somebody with a background in procedural and OO programming, I personally find that graphical approach immensely frustrating, but I’ve known lots of people to whom it speaks.

For a more code-like experience, SuperCollider seems pretty fun, though I haven’t gotten deep into it. ChucK (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu) is another neat option, if you really want to feel like you’re controlling every sample that goes by.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

Have you checked out Max for Live (https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/)? I hear good things about it, second-hand.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#38

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…

While I completely agree with the sentiment, I still wonder what's the difference to graphics. Is drawing easier, for lack of a better word, than gfx-programming? I would argue this comparison is apt and yours falls flat. B flat.

For starters, you could have a skeleton of a script with accessible parameters, given knobs. That would look like a DAW, except for text instead of pseudo design with screws and LCDs that mimic real objects (skeumorphic). Yes, you want buttons, visual programming still sucks. Demo coders like Farbrausch program their own demo tools, eg. Werkkzeug 3, for exactly that reason, isn't it? Considering gfx programming as the comparison, of course textures, models and so on are modeled in an analogue fashion. Nobody programs a human.md3 to evolve from an embryo for fun, but in principle, somewhen it could be done. Music is a lot like vector graphic art, you can do a whole lot with simple shapes and gradients. And you can program complicated sound effects perhaps easier than as a 5 second loop rendered to wav and pitched by the DAW, if you know what I mean.

Note composition as you remark is especially besides the point. The drone noise perspective might be an extremely misleading example, but music programming should be able to paint outside the classical frame. It should allow to define sweet points of resonance, instead of chasing harmony by ear. This does require deep understanding, so instead I'm happy with finger painting ... because it's so close to the metal, err, paper.

It's very sad because I have no idea of the potential. Composition to me is choosing an instrument and arbitrating simple known melodies to complexer ones until it sounds harmonious thanks to obeying the circle of fifths, but that's mostly it and mostly rather superficial, which doesn't matter as long as the instruments sounds niceand if it doesn't I'll split the melody by octaves e.g. and choose two different instruments, alter the octaves to get a high contrast (shout out to my man). Because of the loop nature of pattern based composition, I am mostly not interested in arrangement. This again compares to shader programming. And even big studios basically just stitch together single scenes. ... yadda yadda yadda.

You might also compare the violin to the voice. Far more people can or think they could sing. Making the violin sing is just much more complicated, but not exactly boring.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

If you spring for the full Max4Live Ableton package, you can automate quite a lot via the maxmsp JavaScript object, which gives you scripting access to the Live environment vis the LiveAPI object. It’s kind of an awkward API to use but still much nicer than using the traditional graphical max objects.

https://docs.cycling74.com/max5/vignettes/js/jsliveapi.html

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#40

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…

Software is eating the world. You can simulate almost all the instruments with software, create patterns easily with basic programming skills and create the music that you want in a cheaper and cleaner way compared to the traditional methods. Since this is not a commercial project, there might not be a well-defined target audience but I guess it works both ways. It can attract the software developers to learn some basic music theory and also attract the musicians to learn some programming so that they don't need to do it manually using DAW software.
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