[HN Gopher] Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool
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       Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool
        
       Author : chaosharmonic
       Score  : 182 points
       Date   : 2024-08-09 03:08 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bhmt.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bhmt.dev)
        
       | pjerem wrote:
       | I've had the chance to watch Sam Aaron (Sonic Pi's father) doing
       | a live performance with Sonic Pi several years ago.
       | 
       | He was impressive. The music was evolving each time he changed
       | code in live. And it was good.
        
       | bbbhltz wrote:
       | I was just thinking about Sonic Pi the other day and watched a
       | few videos online. I only ever played with it briefly years
       | ago(busted out the classic Old MacDonald and Hot Cross Buns
       | jams).
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | I think this is one of the cases where Ruby shines, the heavy
       | metal programming allows the syntax to be almost english like
       | programming.
        
         | Alifatisk wrote:
         | meta-programming*
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | I was already thinking about Ruby programming at the sound of
           | Wacken Festival. :)
        
         | leftyspook wrote:
         | Yes, but Sonic Pi DSL feels a little more Lisp-y than natural
         | language-y.
        
       | chaosprint wrote:
       | If you're interested in live coding, feel free to try Glicol
       | (https://glicol.org).
       | 
       | There's also TidalCycles. I have to praise the ability of Haskell
       | and Ruby in creating DSLs
       | 
       | For Glicol, my thoughts on language design are focused on a
       | synth-inspired syntax, speed for composition, and convenience of
       | sound design. The idea is to design a DSL that draws from
       | previous programming habits but isn't confined to existing
       | languages.
        
         | thuuuomas wrote:
         | There's also also the js port of tidalcycles, named strudel,
         | which is a lot of fun
         | 
         | https://github.com/tidalcycles/strudel
        
       | cies wrote:
       | I wish this was available as a flatpak. There are just toooo many
       | dependencies that need to be custom install to install Sonic Pi.
       | Packaging it for distro will be a nightmare.
       | 
       | Flatpak to the rescue.
        
         | TomasSedovic wrote:
         | It is on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/net.sonic_pi.SonicPi
        
         | chaosharmonic wrote:
         | Flatpak and PipeWire.
         | 
         | It actually _is_ available as a Flatpak, and it wasn 't until
         | these two things converged that I stopped having to put effort
         | into getting it to work under Linux. (This is actually another
         | reason it took me so long to pick this back up.)
        
       | latexr wrote:
       | Looks like your HTML comments aren't taking, because your editor
       | converted -- (two hyphens) to -- (one em dash).
        
         | chaosharmonic wrote:
         | Good catch, I actually had been too eager with a find and
         | replace and missed a couple of these XD
        
           | tempfile wrote:
           | Oh, I thought this was deliberate. I liked it!
        
       | naltroc wrote:
       | Shoutout to alsoknownasrox, my favorite Sonic Pi livecoder!
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXIvXrBQFkE
        
       | _vaporwave_ wrote:
       | This is a really neat demo!
       | 
       | Just a heads up though your site layout is broken in Safari
        
         | chaosharmonic wrote:
         | Good to know... Can you tell me more? I don't have any iDevices
         | to test this on
         | 
         | (Feel free to hit my email instead of tying up this thread with
         | it -- you can find it on my homepage)
        
       | dark-star wrote:
       | Some years ago I found a video on YouTube by someone who used
       | Sonic Pi to re-create the THX Deep Note. That video was awesome
       | because he didn't initially explain what he was going to do. Je
       | started by creating a single "note" of the sound but called it a
       | bee. Then he tweaked the sound of the bee a bit here and there,
       | showed what it sounds like, and in the end he was like "and now
       | let's just create a couple hundred of these bees and hear what it
       | sounds like in a beehive", and when he did that the Deep Note
       | emerged.
       | 
       | I loved that video but I have since been unable to find it again.
       | If anyone has a link to that video, please share
        
       | portpecos wrote:
       | So it's a music composition programming language?
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-09 23:01 UTC)