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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

#61

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.

I've been thinking about the differences a lot, and the basic problem is a misunderstanding of what music is.

To a coder, music looks like a sequence of instructions that make sounds, so of course it's natural to assume that it's just like code. Music is a series of events, so let's write code that makes a series of events. How hard can it be?

To a musician, music is tactile, improvisatory, and sculpted. It's nothing like code. At all.

Even if you're using a DAW with a mouse, you're still shifting elements around in time and sculpting fine nuances of the the sound with controller curves.

So code is a terrible UI for music, and live code is even worse. You have to spend so much time on irrelevant distractions - creating buffers, managing objects, iterating through arrays - that there's almost no connection left between the sounds that are being made and your expressive intent.

So live coding only works if your expressive intent is trite and lacking nuance and depth. The only people who do it are hobby coders and a small community of academics who are trying to sell it as a valid revolutionary activity.

Interestingly trackers, which are by far the most successful coding environment for music, also have the lowest conceptual overhead.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#62

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…

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.

Not to a creative musician.

There should be a special name for this fallacy, because it occurs so often on HN.

Just because a domain looks a bit like a trivial mathematical operation to mathematically inclined outsiders doesn't mean that the math really is trivial, or even that the real core of the domain is best summarised as a trivial mapping.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#63
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I inserted 'classical' because otherwise someone would counter with an example of someone who's a self-taught piano genius with no musical theory training.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#64

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…

As a casual user of SonicPi, I would really hate to see Sam give up on this project in favor of another crappy game that's supposed to teach kids to program. I already produce music on instruments and hardware devices. There are so few software tools out there where you can do what SonicPi does at an entry level like I am. It can be really easy to DJ a set w/ this, but you can also get really deep into musical concepts. That's something I really appreciate.

Re: Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code

#65

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…

Well...I program and play music for fun. I enjoy making digital music on Linux with JACK and the way it basically turns your computer into a modular recording studio. I've always been interested in ways to combine programming and music. I've checked out a few different music libraries before, but they've always been fairly low level. As in, program your own oscillators for every synthesizer or sound, program your song, compile then playback. Which honestly, isn't very fun. Or, it's a closed, all inclusive package with builtin editor and massive library compatible with nothing else.

Something with a simple api that can be programmed on the fly is pretty cool. This is something i'm personally interested in checking out and playing with.

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