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Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

sonic-pi.net

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Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#41

Post by [deleted] »

seandougall wrote: post #37
rainbowmverse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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.

[deleted]

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#42

Post by rainbowmverse »

dbattaglia wrote: post #39
rainbowmverse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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

I'll keep this in mind for when I can afford a version of Live that supports this.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#44

Post by empath75 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #17
blubb-fish wrote: post #9

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…

Music production with ableton and the like is programming. All the synths and effects are functions operating on a signal and the various knobs and sliders control parameters.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#45

Post by rollcat »

blubb-fish wrote: post #9

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…

> 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.

You sure?

    % lsb_release -sic
    Debian
    stretch
    % apt-cache madison sonic-pi
      sonic-pi | 2.10.0~repack-2 | https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages
      sonic-pi | 2.10.0~repack-2 | https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch/main Sources

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#46

Post by pmoriarty »

I used to program music (algorithmic composition) using Common Music.[1] It allowed me to program in my language of choice, Scheme.

Unfortunately, last time I tried a few years ago, I couldn't get it to compile.

Does anyone know if there's another good Scheme alternative to it that doesn't have a mountain of dependencies?

[1] - http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#47

Post by merongivian »

jtms wrote: post #32
merongivian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, Im actually using Tone.js for my library, indeed is great but still, is web audio api (everything sounds like gameboy or snes :)), its fun though

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#48

Post by pjc50 »

salimmadjd wrote: post #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 inte…

It's a species of programmable synthesiser. If it looks like a lot of work, you should see someone playing an analog modular synth. In fact, you should see someone playing classical piano; that's years of practice and a whole chunk of music theory.

The most impressive thing you can do with it is live coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPdbp1An2s

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#49

Post by pjc50 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #35
cjhanks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Ruby is a far more pleasing mental interface to software systems than anything else.

I've heard this argument for basically every niche language, usually things like Lisp and (color) Forth. I've concluded that different people have very different internal mental models of programming.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#50

Post by jcelerier »

hsartoris wrote: post #22
blubb-fish wrote: post #9

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).

I'm working on a DAW that you can live-code with JS and math expressions if you're interested: https://ossia.io

C++ just-in-time compilation of sound effects is coming in the few next months (JS just does not cut it for real-time audio with per-sample access).

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