6 ms·

Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools

117 points by samaaron 12y ago

catshirt 12y ago
really cool. nested with_synth and with_fx calls seem less intuitive than an object oriented approach, which mirror traditional circuits. (synth.connect(fx1) fx1.connect(output)). what was the reasoning behind this? i only ask because i could see it making a difference in terms of education. and, what makes this more suitable for schools than ChucK, Supercollider, etc.? that aside, i really wish someone would make a language agnostic livecoding VST so we can start incorporating stuff like Sonic Pi into our real workflows. i sense an integration like that would also gain some attention from people who previously ignored livecoding. i'm sure a lot of students screw around with Fruity Loops or Ableton and would find livecoding much more accessible if it tapped into the tooling they already understood.
- Intermernet 12y ago
  The closest I've seen to this in reality is Max for Live. The speed of development is astounding, and the results are professional in quality, and quite robust. It would be brilliant if the resulting product could be "VST-ized". It's just a pity it's not cheap (around $700 to $800 for Live Studio with Max). I can see this hampering it's potential as an education tool outside of anything but specialist audio training organizations. EDIT: I completely forgot about SynthEdit (http://www.synthedit.com/ http://www.synthedit.com/). It can export VSTs.
  - bgruber 12y ago
    Before Max 5, making vst plugins with was very much supported, and was explicitly dropped in favor of Max for Live. Here's a blog post exploring some alternatives from when the drop in support was announced: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plug-in-development-support-free-commercial-alternatives/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plu...
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  There's a basic problem with live coding, which is defining the problem domain. Live coding systems are only really good for building teeny tiny little toy automata, which usually do simple stuff with note lists, and maybe apply a bit of randomness or some simple repeating functions to a parameter or five. Weapons-grade commercial music is much more complicated. The sounds are richer, the arrangements and mixes are immensely complex (even for simple songs), and generally there's a ridiculous amount of care and detail. But... if you start building in machine learning, database searches, and super-complex DSP patches, and the stuff you really need to make non-trivial music, you're not really live coding any more - you're plugging pre-existing modules and data together by typing. Also, watching people typing is kind of dull. I think there are solutions to both problems, but REPL-music systems are only ever going to be a step on the way to them. I'd be surprised if live coding ever makes it into the mainstream in the way that (say) eSports almost have.
  - yaxu 12y ago
    I disagree for a few reasons - language is very good at describing complicated things, minimal music is great, and there's nothing at all stopping live coders from using rich sounds.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      Then why don't live coders use rich sounds, or make complicated things? As for 'minimal music' - most of it isn't really all that minimal, and it certainly can't be reduced to trivial algos. And if your only option is to be minimal, maybe that's not so great. Point is that only a tiny subset of the population has ever been interested in listening to music defined and created exclusively by writing code. Live coding caters very nicely to them. No one else seems to be listening. Over the same period, CGI has moved from basic wireframes to epic photorealism-with-AI. You can see this stuff in games and movies, and it's awesome. Why aren't code musicians interested in pushing the boundaries of code music by aiming for something with similar complexity? Here's a thing: after nearly sixty years of code music, exactly zero code music composers have troubled the public imagination. Over the same period we've had literally hundreds of new electronic genres and styles, and even people who don't much like electronica can name at least a couple of people who make it. We've also had game music coders writing complex AIs for arranging and generating music on the fly in game contexts. But live coders don't seem interested in any of this, because typing. Honestly, this completely baffles me.
gracenotes 12y ago
There was a talk at Strange Loop 2014, "Our Shared Joy of Programming", which was just recently put on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0 The whole talk is stimulating, but the parts relevant to Sonic Pi are its Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/) lineage at about 9:05, a demo at about 17:36, and the experience using it in schools (http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/) at about 26:48. What I got out of it was that it's a language which is meant to be both fully featured and easy for kids to pick up, to get interested in music, programming, or both. Maybe not so much programming as just "computational thinking". It has less incidental complexity than EDSLs (like Overtone) or traditional tools which expose more of the synthesis pipeline. Compared to most video game/graphics frameworks, which are also used in education, you can get to more polished content faster.
ThomPete 12y ago
For a long long time I have wanted to do a language for programming music. I like how easy this is to get started with it almost feels like the old tracker days.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  How is your conception of what is involved in 'do[ing] a language for programming music' different to super-colider or ChucK or puredata? Not being aggressive just interested in how you see the problem.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    Getting started to begin with :) It feels like the PHP of music programming environments. I am a former musician so approach music more like Sonic Pi I mean it's this Sonic Pi with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.2 do loop do play scale(:Eb2, :major_pentatonic, num_octaves: 3).choose, release: 0.1, amp: rand sleep 0.1 end end vs. super collider // Simple synth definition using the Atari2600 UGen: ( SynthDef(\atari2600, {|out= 0, gate= 1, tone0= 5, tone1= 8, freq0= 10, freq1= 20, amp= 1, pan= 0| var e, z; e= EnvGen.kr(Env.asr(0.01, amp, 0.05), gate, doneAction:2); z= Atari2600.ar(tone0, tone1, freq0, freq1, 15, 15); Out.ar(out, Pan2.ar(z*e, pan)); }).store ) // And a pattern to play it: ( Pbind( \instrument, \atari2600, \dur, Pseq([0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.45], inf), \amp, 0.8, \tone0, Pseq([Pseq([2, 5], 32), Pseq([3, 5], 32)], inf), \tone1, 14, \freq0, Pseq([Pbrown(28, 31, 1, 32), Pbrown(23, 26, 3, 32)], inf), \freq1, Pseq([Pn(10, 16), Pn(11, 16)], inf) ).play ) When playing music the ability to quickly get up and running is more important than the flexibility of the system. I.e. you wanna quickly get to the point when you have fun and then you optimize later. But don't get me wrong supercollider is a fantastic tool and was a real innovation.
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      Fine, so still REPL but with built in stuff to get a performance going. I get the picture.
dmoo 12y ago
Also have a look at http://earsketch.gatech.edu http://earsketch.gatech.edu Python + music
- zeitpolizei 12y ago
  I'm glad someone mentioned EarSketch. As it's more focused on teaching programming and computing principles by making music, as opposed to a general purpose computer music language/environment like Chuck, Pure Data, and Supercollider. I was involved with the project during Grad school when it was completely attached to a DAW (Reaper), but it can now run in a browser. I'm usually not that excited about audio applications in a browser, but I think this is a great use case.
zalmoxes 12y ago
Not bad. Reminds me of Hackety Hack. Bret Victor's criticism of KhanAcademy is just as relevant here http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
- yaxu 12y ago
  I think Bret Victor underplays the importance of liveness ("almost worthless", eh?), and doesn't touch on the possibilities of making programming a shared experience, that is itself culturally meaningful, inclusive activity, e.g. musical. This is what Sam Aaron and other live coders have been working on for the past decade. It's a totally different approach really, through making music together, nonstop for years.. Sonic Pi is impressive and successful because it's grounded in actual arts practice, not extrapolations from rigged demos.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  I doubt that Bret Victor would be critical to Sonic Pi given his love for Seymore Paperts "Mindstorms" which has a progamming language called Turtle. Sonic Pi is just that the Turtle of music programming environments. It doesn't start with abstraction but with a ground in playability.
glial 12y ago
This is great. As someone who's tried to get into coded music, the biggest hurdle for me has always been getting the pipeline set up properly (including learning VIM commands). This handles all of that.
zapt02 12y ago
Would it be possible to run this under Windows? :o
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Also how about non-pi Debian linux? I'll experiment with the .tgz file for that.
  - tripzilch 12y ago
    Hey if you figure this out, please report back--I'd love to try this program.
- MichaelMcQuirk 12y ago
  I hope so, i really want to try this out.
- jweather 12y ago
  As of today, yes. Here's an MSI with all dependencies packaged (Ruby, SuperCollider, QT): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi Or build it yourself: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#compiling-the-qt-interface-on-windows-32-bit https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#...
ArthurClemens 12y ago
This seems related to Chuck http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu
jimiwen 12y ago
let's if some mainstream will use it e.g. https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf
Ashuu 12y ago
Is it possible to use sonic pi on windows?
- jweather 12y ago
  As of today, yes. Here's an MSI with all dependencies packaged (Ruby, SuperCollider, QT): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi Or build it yourself: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#compiling-the-qt-interface-on-windows-32-bit https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#...

117 points by samaaron 12y ago

really cool. nested with_synth and with_fx calls seem less intuitive than an object oriented approach, which mirror traditional circuits. (synth.connect(fx1) fx1.connect(output)). what was the reasoning behind this? i only ask because i could see it making a difference in terms of education. and, what makes this more suitable for schools than ChucK, Supercollider, etc.? that aside, i really wish someone would make a language agnostic livecoding VST so we can start incorporating stuff like Sonic Pi into our real workflows. i sense an integration like that would also gain some attention from people who previously ignored livecoding. i'm sure a lot of students screw around with Fruity Loops or Ableton and would find livecoding much more accessible if it tapped into the tooling they already understood.

Intermernet 12y ago
The closest I've seen to this in reality is Max for Live. The speed of development is astounding, and the results are professional in quality, and quite robust. It would be brilliant if the resulting product could be "VST-ized". It's just a pity it's not cheap (around $700 to $800 for Live Studio with Max). I can see this hampering it's potential as an education tool outside of anything but specialist audio training organizations. EDIT: I completely forgot about SynthEdit (http://www.synthedit.com/ http://www.synthedit.com/). It can export VSTs.
- bgruber 12y ago
  Before Max 5, making vst plugins with was very much supported, and was explicitly dropped in favor of Max for Live. Here's a blog post exploring some alternatives from when the drop in support was announced: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plug-in-development-support-free-commercial-alternatives/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plu...
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
There's a basic problem with live coding, which is defining the problem domain. Live coding systems are only really good for building teeny tiny little toy automata, which usually do simple stuff with note lists, and maybe apply a bit of randomness or some simple repeating functions to a parameter or five. Weapons-grade commercial music is much more complicated. The sounds are richer, the arrangements and mixes are immensely complex (even for simple songs), and generally there's a ridiculous amount of care and detail. But... if you start building in machine learning, database searches, and super-complex DSP patches, and the stuff you really need to make non-trivial music, you're not really live coding any more - you're plugging pre-existing modules and data together by typing. Also, watching people typing is kind of dull. I think there are solutions to both problems, but REPL-music systems are only ever going to be a step on the way to them. I'd be surprised if live coding ever makes it into the mainstream in the way that (say) eSports almost have.
- yaxu 12y ago
  I disagree for a few reasons - language is very good at describing complicated things, minimal music is great, and there's nothing at all stopping live coders from using rich sounds.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    Then why don't live coders use rich sounds, or make complicated things? As for 'minimal music' - most of it isn't really all that minimal, and it certainly can't be reduced to trivial algos. And if your only option is to be minimal, maybe that's not so great. Point is that only a tiny subset of the population has ever been interested in listening to music defined and created exclusively by writing code. Live coding caters very nicely to them. No one else seems to be listening. Over the same period, CGI has moved from basic wireframes to epic photorealism-with-AI. You can see this stuff in games and movies, and it's awesome. Why aren't code musicians interested in pushing the boundaries of code music by aiming for something with similar complexity? Here's a thing: after nearly sixty years of code music, exactly zero code music composers have troubled the public imagination. Over the same period we've had literally hundreds of new electronic genres and styles, and even people who don't much like electronica can name at least a couple of people who make it. We've also had game music coders writing complex AIs for arranging and generating music on the fly in game contexts. But live coders don't seem interested in any of this, because typing. Honestly, this completely baffles me.

gracenotes 12y ago

There was a talk at Strange Loop 2014, "Our Shared Joy of Programming", which was just recently put on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0 The whole talk is stimulating, but the parts relevant to Sonic Pi are its Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/) lineage at about 9:05, a demo at about 17:36, and the experience using it in schools (http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/) at about 26:48. What I got out of it was that it's a language which is meant to be both fully featured and easy for kids to pick up, to get interested in music, programming, or both. Maybe not so much programming as just "computational thinking". It has less incidental complexity than EDSLs (like Overtone) or traditional tools which expose more of the synthesis pipeline. Compared to most video game/graphics frameworks, which are also used in education, you can get to more polished content faster.

ThomPete 12y ago

For a long long time I have wanted to do a language for programming music. I like how easy this is to get started with it almost feels like the old tracker days.

keithpeter 12y ago
How is your conception of what is involved in 'do[ing] a language for programming music' different to super-colider or ChucK or puredata? Not being aggressive just interested in how you see the problem.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  Getting started to begin with :) It feels like the PHP of music programming environments. I am a former musician so approach music more like Sonic Pi I mean it's this Sonic Pi with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.2 do loop do play scale(:Eb2, :major_pentatonic, num_octaves: 3).choose, release: 0.1, amp: rand sleep 0.1 end end vs. super collider // Simple synth definition using the Atari2600 UGen: ( SynthDef(\atari2600, {|out= 0, gate= 1, tone0= 5, tone1= 8, freq0= 10, freq1= 20, amp= 1, pan= 0| var e, z; e= EnvGen.kr(Env.asr(0.01, amp, 0.05), gate, doneAction:2); z= Atari2600.ar(tone0, tone1, freq0, freq1, 15, 15); Out.ar(out, Pan2.ar(z*e, pan)); }).store ) // And a pattern to play it: ( Pbind( \instrument, \atari2600, \dur, Pseq([0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.45], inf), \amp, 0.8, \tone0, Pseq([Pseq([2, 5], 32), Pseq([3, 5], 32)], inf), \tone1, 14, \freq0, Pseq([Pbrown(28, 31, 1, 32), Pbrown(23, 26, 3, 32)], inf), \freq1, Pseq([Pn(10, 16), Pn(11, 16)], inf) ).play ) When playing music the ability to quickly get up and running is more important than the flexibility of the system. I.e. you wanna quickly get to the point when you have fun and then you optimize later. But don't get me wrong supercollider is a fantastic tool and was a real innovation.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Fine, so still REPL but with built in stuff to get a performance going. I get the picture.

dmoo 12y ago

Also have a look at http://earsketch.gatech.edu http://earsketch.gatech.edu Python + music

zeitpolizei 12y ago
I'm glad someone mentioned EarSketch. As it's more focused on teaching programming and computing principles by making music, as opposed to a general purpose computer music language/environment like Chuck, Pure Data, and Supercollider. I was involved with the project during Grad school when it was completely attached to a DAW (Reaper), but it can now run in a browser. I'm usually not that excited about audio applications in a browser, but I think this is a great use case.

zalmoxes 12y ago

Not bad. Reminds me of Hackety Hack. Bret Victor's criticism of KhanAcademy is just as relevant here http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

yaxu 12y ago
I think Bret Victor underplays the importance of liveness ("almost worthless", eh?), and doesn't touch on the possibilities of making programming a shared experience, that is itself culturally meaningful, inclusive activity, e.g. musical. This is what Sam Aaron and other live coders have been working on for the past decade. It's a totally different approach really, through making music together, nonstop for years.. Sonic Pi is impressive and successful because it's grounded in actual arts practice, not extrapolations from rigged demos.
ThomPete 12y ago
I doubt that Bret Victor would be critical to Sonic Pi given his love for Seymore Paperts "Mindstorms" which has a progamming language called Turtle. Sonic Pi is just that the Turtle of music programming environments. It doesn't start with abstraction but with a ground in playability.

glial 12y ago

This is great. As someone who's tried to get into coded music, the biggest hurdle for me has always been getting the pipeline set up properly (including learning VIM commands). This handles all of that.

zapt02 12y ago

Would it be possible to run this under Windows? :o

keithpeter 12y ago
Also how about non-pi Debian linux? I'll experiment with the .tgz file for that.
- tripzilch 12y ago
  Hey if you figure this out, please report back--I'd love to try this program.
MichaelMcQuirk 12y ago
I hope so, i really want to try this out.
jweather 12y ago
As of today, yes. Here's an MSI with all dependencies packaged (Ruby, SuperCollider, QT): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi Or build it yourself: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#compiling-the-qt-interface-on-windows-32-bit https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#...

ArthurClemens 12y ago

This seems related to Chuck http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu

jimiwen 12y ago

let's if some mainstream will use it e.g. https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf

Ashuu 12y ago

Is it possible to use sonic pi on windows?

jweather 12y ago
As of today, yes. Here's an MSI with all dependencies packaged (Ruby, SuperCollider, QT): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167975/Sonic-Pi.msi Or build it yourself: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#compiling-the-qt-interface-on-windows-32-bit https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL.md#...