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Australians making music with computer code
- rahimnathwani 7y agoWow, not just any computer code, but Lisp code!
- cutler 7y agoThe code contains car so is probably Scheme which surprised me considering the popularity of Overtone, written in Clojure.
- Qwertystop 7y agoCommon Lisp also uses car. But looking at source of https://github.com/digego/extempore https://github.com/digego/extempore , yeah, Scheme.
- cat199 7y agoscheme & lisp actually have quite a history in computer music - see snd editor, common lisp music in the late 80s/early 90s, adding a processing core to a lisp/scheme was probably the easiest way to bootstrap an interactive/interpreted environment, and also give you the language features to design specialized syntax for your music language
- jarmitage 7y agoAndrew Sorensen is the creator of Extempore: https://github.com/digego/extempore https://github.com/digego/extempore His PhD thesis about it (2018) is worth reading for anyone interested in live programming of any sort, music or otherwise: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/144603 https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/14460...
- folkstack 7y agoExtempore was almost my jam when I got started with code-music in 2014, but javascript was just good enough, and the web audio API soon had a script processor, so I started building my own stack in the browser and never looked back. But I was impressed, and envied the processing power. However, digital musical interfaces are really what inspired me to code music in the first place, the idea of building them (which I do now). I actually installed and tried extempore, and that almost got me into emacs, b/c the author had integrated it. Smdh. Luckily, I abandoned both, and have used vim ever since. I had looked at all the weird code music editor systems, deemed extempore the best, but ultimately I had to go raw and work my way up.
- craigsmansion 7y agoSome other Free Software programs for live-coding, as the practice is called: Fluxus (https://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ https://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/) with scheme Tidal Cycles (https://tidalcycles.org/index.php/Welcome https://tidalcycles.org/index.php/Welcome) with Haskell
- jcelerier 7y agoshameless plug - the visual language I've worked on during my thesis : https://ossia.io https://ossia.io (https://www.theses.fr/2018BORD0037.pdf https://www.theses.fr/2018BORD0037.pdf) In comparison to other common musical vlangs (Pd, Max, etc), it offers a visual syntax for loops, triggers and conditions and is time-centric instead of dataflow-centric (so, better for making shows & songs than making instruments).
- gale93 7y agoCool, but nothing extraordinary
- crispinh 7y agoDoes anyone know of any livecode music recordings that they'd recommend, ideally ones that are more musically impressive than technically impressive? I've had a couple of short goes at it but without knowing the end results I found it hard to get anywhere.
- abathur 7y agoI'm not into it enough to have any sense of the scope of the music out there, but I did notice while I was trying to figure out what ORCA was that a fair number of people are hashtagging short clips on Twitter while they play with it: https://twitter.com/hashtag/ORCΛ?f=live https://twitter.com/hashtag/ORCΛ?f=live
- jarmitage 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_9jWF3Xr0KuIIuIIV_q5hA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_9jWF3Xr0KuIIuIIV_q5hA
- cies 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1RxpJkvqpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1RxpJkvqpY
- folkstack 7y agohttps://soundcloud.com/folkstack/sets/code-named-mixtape https://soundcloud.com/folkstack/sets/code-named-mixtape
- yaxu 7y agoI don't know why this isn't linked in the article, but I sought out Allison Walker's music and it's great: https://allisonwalker.bandcamp.com/track/3 https://allisonwalker.bandcamp.com/track/3
- sideb0ard 7y agoHere's a couple I'd recommend from AAAssembly - Kindohm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEq_h5UQJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEq_h5UQJM Renick Bell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pks_BSqHB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pks_BSqHB0 Algobabez - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GTN8ELL75g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GTN8ELL75g Sebastian Camens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu4dHW04W9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu4dHW04W9Y
- abathur 7y agoAdding ORCA (https://100r.co/pages/orca.html https://100r.co/pages/orca.html) to the list. Earlier this year I stumbled onto Hundred Rabbits, which happened to have recently released ORCA (described as "an open-source visual programming language, designed to create procedural sequencers on the fly, and control other applications.") At the time I didn't really know what that live-coding was a thing in terms of musical performance and just invented my own explanation for what they must mean and intend it for. About a month ago I stumbled onto a reference to algorave, and then looked up a short documentary, in which I saw a few quick frames of someone doing a live show with ORCA (and, of course, encountered the term live-coding). I guess it's a little bit more like a puzzle than some of the other languages/environments, but I like that it's possible to directly visually enjoy an orca program operating in the way you can't with the others I've seen (without generative visualizers of some sort...)
- agentwiggles 7y agoYES!! I've been trying to remember this for months. I remember seeing ORCA coming across HN a while ago, and I was interested in checking it out, but forgot what it was called. Thanks for jogging my memory, looking forward to playing with ORCA.
- officeplant 7y agoI'd link some tutorial videos a friend did on ORCA but I'm not sure if that's kosher on HN. Look around on youtube there are some tutorials for it sprining up out there. Although some of the tutorials are a tad out of date now that there has been some changes in ORCA.
- oysterfish 7y agoUhhh as someone who loves electronic music, and code: i really hated what that sounded like.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoLike most procedural/generative art, it's a lot more about the tools than the product.
- theon144 7y agoHard disagree, a great deal of procedural art is pleasing and artistically worthwhile even if you don't consider the method it came to be - although usually it's fairly apparent. I think I'd invoke Sturgeon's law instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoHard disagree with your disagree. Very few procedural artists seem to have a good feel for the medium they're working in, or know much about art/music history and current trends. They either have a very shallow understanding ("I made an image" = "I made art"; "I played some samples in a browser or trained a GAN" = "I made music") or they have an academic misunderstanding, based on a decent technical understanding of the grammars of the medium, but limited insight into how creative originators can use grammars expressively. There are exceptions, especially in visuals, so you have a point about Sturgeon's Law. But there are still far too many people treating generative media as a technical exercise, and too few using them for impressive original creativity.
- fragmede 7y agoThey said (and say) the same thing about DJs who use automatic beat-matching and mp3s. Fascinatingly Berlin still clings onto vinyl (for now). It's fair to point out that the current users of the tools aren't seasoned/world-class producers/DJs, and don't have that level of training and practice or their musical ear though. It's amazing that these tools exist, along with those that can operate them, so music can be generated via code, live, and it comes down to (your opinion on) whether or not these tools ever grow past the "research" phase that they're currently in right now. IMO the tools will continue to evolve until they are useful in the hands of "creative originators [that] can use grammars expressively". There's a impassioned community building and refining the tools and tooling, and its my belief and opinion - we don't have to all agree - that the algorave tools will eventually get to a place that's useful for creatives, and into their hands. Then the music being generated becomes the attraction, instead of the coding tool being a gimmick of an attraction. After all, what's a drum machine, but a clumsy, analog "for" loop?
- thundergolfer 7y agoI went to a presentation by Sorensen at a functional programming conference. At the start I thought, “ok great, you’ve made a alternating tone...”, but by then end what he’d built up in front of you was quite awesome and impactful. It wasn’t so much the the music, it was nice but nothing on what a producer like Flume can do with time and equipment. It was the process of seeing basically noise become music all with code in a text editor. Would definitely go see live-coding again.
- wtdata 7y agoIs there any of these live music programming languages that uses python? Can't get my head around lisp/clojure.
- yaxu 7y agoYes today is your lucky day! https://foxdot.org/ https://foxdot.org/
- antfarm 7y agoThe predecessor of Extempore: Impromptu http://impromptu.moso.com.au/ http://impromptu.moso.com.au/
- redka 7y agoSince no one mentioned it. Sonic Pi[0] is probably the easiest to learn and quite powerful[1]. You program in Ruby and both the IDE and the API are quite simple to start with. [0] https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/ [1] https://youtu.be/vz9oXcmwKP4?t=29m35s https://youtu.be/vz9oXcmwKP4?t=29m35s
- stuntkite 7y agoIt’s an easy to use and pretty wrapper around Supercollider. Which is neat because once you get deep you can graduate to more custom SC setups. I spent a lot of time with PureData. It sucks that it’s no longer maintained. Supercollider and Sonic Pi are very worthy successors. Here’s one of my fave public PureData patches, even though it’s dated. Generative dubstep that builds towards a drop that is triggered when you hit the drop button. https://github.com/dropship/special-delivery https://github.com/dropship/special-delivery
- spacechild1 7y ago> It sucks that it’s no longer maintained. huh, why do you think that? https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data Maybe you've been thinking about Pd extended - which is indeed unmaintained. There is a kind of successor called PurrData, but it's not 100% compatible with Pd Vanilla. BTW, Pd 0.50 will probably be released in a couple of weeks (I'm a regular contributor)
- stuntkite 7y agoHuh. This is all very interesting. Thank you! I'll look into it!
- fragmede 7y agohttps://gibber.cc/ https://gibber.cc/ by Charlie Roberts also fits under this category.
- sideb0ard 7y agoCharlie Roberts live at Algorithmic Art Assembly - super good stuff! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnqS8hQVhXA&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnqS8hQVhXA&t=7s
- billfruit 7y agoI thought csound was a pretty competent package for generating music with computers. A lot of these newer music packages seems keen to evolve independently than build upon the considerable amount of work done on csound for decades.
- stuntkite 7y agoMost of them still leverage csound in some if not many ways. Anyone serious about this stuff hasn’t left csound behind.
- billfruit 7y agoI haven't seen any mention of csound in this articles or in the couple other recent similar packages which popped up in HN.
- jarmitage 7y agoCsound is as healthy as it has arguably ever been, with an active conference, journal, Slack and new targets such as Web Audio and Bela.io. Many live coding environments use SuperCollider as the engine (Sonic Pi, Overtone, TidalCycles), which while not as old as Csound is over 20 years old so there’s plenty of building on existing systems going on. Departures from Csound and SuperCollider are also necessary for many artistic and technical reasons, and the live coding community welcomes the diversity of available systems and the increasing diversity of the systems creators themselves.
- commandersaki 7y agoI was doing this with qbasic back in the day.