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Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

sonic-pi.net

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Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#61

Post by karmakaze »

d--b wrote: post #35
karmakaze wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you continue the live coding (thought) experiment, you would naturally code a better interface. At that point you would be reinventing something like Ableton Live, but completely different. Similar to how using Lisp for a project develops its own DSL for the application different from other DSLs for other applications. So we'd be watching someone simultaneously live code/play music and live code their interface. P…

Right, good point. In some ways, sonic Pi is already a higher order interface than whatever language it's written in. I am mostly talking about the way of inputting the code though. Having someone bent over a laptop is fairly disgraceful.. Maybe people said the same when knob-turning DJs appeared.

This is a good 1-'man'-show[0] TEDx, where watching someone program/fiddle with (software and) knobs is great to watch. Talk's good too--build-up to performance/demo is about halfway through.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5yxIzs5Wug

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#62

Post by mundietalk »

Sonic Pi is actually a pretty damn good synth. I played around with it a lot. It's not just a for-the-sake-of-code synthesizer.

I got some Guitar pieces from freesound.org and built an electric guitar synth. I then mixed it with some Tibetan Fire Priest chants and built this:

https://soundcloud.com/user-408150882-831970789/rhythm-of-ka...

As some of the comments here specify, the UI isn't exactly conducive to building 'heavy' music.

For instance, something that I built this morning using Kontakt (https://soundcloud.com/amal-krishnan-103125344/megatherion-p...) is painful to develop on SonicPi. Of course, SonicPi can be extended to perform some of the functionalities you'd expect a professional synthesizer to do. {DOS->Win 3.1}

There are some other issues as well centered around 'coding for developing music' and 'live coding'. Everything you build in the code --when I last checked-- goes into one stream. You really have to visualize time flow outside of the software. This makes editing chunks hard. A UI based synthesizer is a lot easier to work with: turn a few knobs and push a few keys as opposed to coding. Live Coding never really works in practice, and I'm talking about performing at the professional DJ level. It's easier to use a 'GUI' (a synth front end with its knobs etc) as opposed to code. Music tends not to flow 'rationally; inspiration tends to externalize in a kinetic fashion.

All that said, Sonic Pi is a rich platform to build synthesizers and pieces to go with the other tools in your music building deck.

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#63

Post by ibz »

xavriley wrote: post #24
cies wrote: post #17

This project is like magic, though really hard to install on it's own. Hence the approach that is advised is to run it on a Rasberry Pi (something like a physical docker container). This project duct-tapes so many cool technologies together that the whole setup become quite brittle: you need the exact versions of all dependencies + patches + wiring/configs and only then it works. It's very complete: the "language" (R…

I agree that the install is hard on linux but there are prebuilt packages for Windows and MacOS. There's no requirement to use a Raspberry Pi. A long time ago (2017) I did successfully get Sonic Pi running in Docker but it wasn't straightforward https://github.com/xavriley/sonic-pi-docker If anyone wants to pick this back up I'd be happy to help

There are actually prebuilt packages for Debian as well, which can also work on Ubuntu.

I compiled it myself on Fedora and it works great. It wasn't too hard. Perhaps I should just document the steps somewhere.

What I tried and failed was to run it on OpenBSD. I spent all my free time in the evenings for about 2 weeks before I eventually gave up and moved to Linux. I agree with parent post that Sonic Pi is essentially a bunch of stuff duct taped to each other. Which is nice because it can do many things, but it is definitely not a very clean architecture and not easy to port.

Glicol has a much much nicer architecture. It is written in Rust and doesn't even depend on SuperCollider! It is so portable that it even compiles to WASM and runs in the browser. But I find Ruby easier to understand than Glicol's own language, plus ... I like Sonic Pi's feature completeness. It comes with plenty of pre-defined synths (not just sine/square/sawtooth, but some actually very complex stuff). It comes with many filters and sample manipulation tools. You can connect MIDI inputs with just a couple of lines of code... So yeah, I hate it and I love it at the same time!

No idea about the performance on RPI, do you guys find it acceptable? I am actually just thinking to use an older laptop as a "physical container" for Sonic Pi. Essentially a laptop that is only meant as a musical instrument, and it always just works (after the initial setup).

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#64

Post by ibz »

keepquestioning wrote: post #51

I want to learn synthesis, but want to make pop songs as good as "Closer" by The Chainsmokers, any idea where to start?

I learned a lot about synthesis and sound design from Sonic Pi, and yet Sonic Pi goes much much further than being a synth, since it also works with samples, and most importantly with time and synchronization! No idea about the chain smokers, but my guess is that you can create essentially anything in Sonic Pi, especially if you bring in your own samples.
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