Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code • Hacker News Board

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#51

Post by vinceguidry » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #49

vinceguidry wrote: post #35

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. 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.

I've used Lisp, and fell in love with it, before finding Ruby. Ruby is better than Lisp. It took me some time to realize this. Lisp isn't bad, but it's not Ruby.

I wouldn't call Ruby a niche language. You can use it for anything, it's very much a general purpose programming language. Most people only build websites with it, but you do see lots of other kinds of things built with it too, including, you know, a digital audio workstation.

I'd call PHP a niche language before I'd pin that on Ruby.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#52

Post by boucaron » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

It is pretty neat and the main coder is doing pretty cool demos. It is not easy to master it, it reminds me the cool time of modules on Amiga and its magic woaaa effect.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#53

Post by marcelr » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

Sonic pi is great, I used it live as part of a noise / ambient music project I do. It really feels like just using a DAW but having more control and much faster. Unfortunately I fell off it, because I struggled with Linux audio so much and just gave up at some point. But it's good fun and more than a toy for sure.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#54

Post by thisismitch » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

ryanisnan wrote: post #20

thisismitch wrote: post #7

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?

Not exactly—I actually got a CS degree back in 2005 but got into sysadmin work. I started at DigitalOcean as a technical writer (tutorials) in 2014 then, after 18 months of writing, brushed up on my skills by working on side projects and pairing weekly with one of DO’s engineering managers.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#55

Post by greptastic » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 1:54 AM UTC

What I'd like to see (or find, perhaps it's out there) is something that's based more on triggering loops and samples (with optional processing) as opposed to synthesis.

Earsketch sort of looks like what I'm looking for, but it's web only and I can't much get it to run?

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#56

Post by WalterSear » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 2:45 AM UTC

seandougall wrote: post #36

darpa_escapee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not just the graphical approach, IMHO, it's a fundamental paradigms are poorly thought out, and hard to reason/debug.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#57

Post by WalterSear » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #48

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

You make it sound like refined musicality and technique are solely the purview of 'real' instruments.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#58

Post by dyeje » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 2:59 AM UTC

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…

I think you're really underestimating the number of people who are programmers and musicians. As one, I've found Sonic Pi to be fun to mess around with.

Also, how do you make something like this without music theory? At the end of the day, you need an abstraction. Why make a new abstraction for creating music when everybody already agreed on one?

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#59

Post by dpeck » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 3:18 AM UTC

Sonic Pi is awesome, my son has a great time going through the great tutorial and riffing on the examples a bit. But when we were done with the tutorial I was (and still am) a bit lost as to where to go next. I don’t have any understanding of music theory and Sonic Pi seems like a great way to learn the basics of it, but I couldn’t find anything that occupied that next step after the tutorial.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#60

Post by crucialfelix » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

darpa_escapee wrote: post #24

pjmlp wrote: 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.

And of course supercollider which is what overtone and sonicpi are based on. That's the sound engine