3 HN users recommended this demo3 months2017–2020score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN people recommend it as the most impressive demonstration of live coding music, especially to those curious about programmable music.
A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.
“The most impressive thing you can do with it is live coding” (HN, 2018)
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: [this video]
Most impressive thing you can do with programmable music
Sonic Pi is really fun to play around. However, the editor is fucking abysmal and turns me off every time I try to use it, since I can't use my muscle memory to copy/paste/multiselect and have to otherwise learn another set of keybinding that make no sense whatsoever (instead of CTRL-X to cut you have ALT-X, for example). I wish I were able to use VSCode. I know an extension exists, but it only sends the current file to the Sonic Pi session and has no autocompletion, which is fairly necessary during a live-coding music session to keep the tunes flowing. If I'll ever get around to understand how to develop an extension I'll try my hand at it, I guess. But otherwise yeah, it's some good stuff and has lots of unexplored potential. [this video]
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