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: <a href="https://gist.github.com/thisismitch/be9287c80903cad151fe" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/thisismitch/be9287c80903cad151fe</a><p>It took me way longer than I'd like to admit! Enjoy!<p>Edit: Here's an MP3 export of it <a href="https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-anicas-project/corridors-of-code" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-anicas-project/corridors-of-...</a> for easier listening.
Sonic Pi is pretty cool. I really liked Overtone because I like LISPs, so I have chosen Extempore to do my electronic composing [1].<p>I first started with CM (Common Music), which also has a one-click download for Linux, Mac and Windows. It also has somewhat of an IDE called Grace, "Grace (Graphical Realtime Algorithmic Composition Environment) a drag-and-drop, cross-platform app implemented in JUCE (C++) and S7 Scheme." [2] The birds example is amazing! They build up a very real-sounding bird call from scratch.<p><pre><code> [1] https://extemporelang.github.io/
[2] http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/</code></pre>
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.<p>BUT...to put my PM hat on, I'm not sure who is the target audience here?<p>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.<p>If the intention is a fun vehicle to to teach programming, then I think there are better ways. I looked thought the samples and I think as a kid I would get tired very quickly. There are so many function calls to learn. Right away I have to understand the concept of random and what it does.<p>I think if the idea is to empower musicians, this seems like a lot of work to create music.<p>At the end, you have to know some music principle and already understand a lot of different programming concepts to actually do anything.<p>This combination makes doing programming dependent on knowing music theory and creating music knowing a lot of programming and exploring all the different functions and libraries to then apply your music theory to.<p>To me it would be frustrating. And for musicians who I guess, can potentially create some sounds that might be difficult with existing tools, just to hard to do.<p>It would have been far better to have a simple 2D game board (tanks, robots, etc. I know it's been done) as a programing tool than inside a complex world of music theory.<p>Or at least make the libraries not dependent on music theory and provided some higher level presets with built in abstractions. Example: loop song(type: techno_beat, length:300) (do some stuff here) end_loop<p>Make the user feel like superhuman musicians.
I played with sonicpi for a while and it was fun until I hit the limitations of my severely lacking music theory knowledge.<p>I feel like all the best tutorials are written for people who are good with music but need to learn to code. Anyone out there have any good resources for using sonicpi to learn more music theory as a coder?
i am very excited by the idea to create music by means of programming. but it seems that there isn't even a single project with an active community. supercollider seems to be the most popular with regard to GitHub stats. Sonic pi seems to be the most recent endeavor in this area. but it doesn't offer any deb-packages. compiling for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be not documented.<p>my impression is that this is coming up every couple of years but nobody so far succeeded at actually producing a system that gains meaningful popularity. not to mention how difficult it was too compile/set up the software for the various projects i have tried.<p>another problem is that very few YouTube tutorials showcase rythms and melodies going beyond something resembling a ping pong match on speed.<p>would love to hear your opinion.
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.<p>Earsketch sort of looks like what I'm looking for, but it's web only and I can't much get it to run?
I took a shot at it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUgcUUB298" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUgcUUB298</a>
I used to program music (algorithmic composition) using Common Music.[1] It allowed me to program in my language of choice, Scheme.<p>Unfortunately, last time I tried a few years ago, I couldn't get it to compile.<p>Does anyone know if there's another good Scheme alternative to it that doesn't have a mountain of dependencies?<p>[1] - <a href="http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/</a>
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.
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.
Related project here<p><a href="https://naivesound.com/glitch-orig/#t*(42%26t%3E%3E10)" rel="nofollow">https://naivesound.com/glitch-orig/#t*(42%26t%3E%3E10)</a>
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.
Aaah, I have been meaning to play around with this program for a few years now, but I never get around to it.<p>The idea, though, is really, really cool!