overtone VS Tidal

https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros

Incidentally, for making music with Clojure there's Overtone: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

> Midi being an “artist” tool places it more as a medium like paint.

I’ve used MIDI “as paint”.

Written music using code to MIDI(1), and wrote “cross instrument” music, ie using my keyboard as drum machine.

But these days MIDI is chiefly an archival method for me.

Every time I touch my keyboard is recorded, is much smaller than a comparable audio recording, by design “forced fidelity” in the recording, and I am able to pipe the MIDI format through transcription software (which would be near impossible from an audio recording today).

(1) http://overtone.github.io/

I've never actually used it myself. I've preferred systems that talk to SuperCollider, like overtone, because it's already rock solid and has lots of good DSP built in.

Thanks. I don't know to what extend its "better-because-of-clojure" but I also found overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone which should be good fun (though the underlying synthesizer is supercollider/C++).

You might want to look at Overtone, which is a clojure environment built on top of overtone, and which integrates with processing and a few other similar things.

https://overtone.github.io/

> I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point.

The you'd probably have hated its predecessor which was all about the parentheses: https://overtone.github.io/

It's too bad that superficial stuff like which characters you need to type is holding you back. Getting used to Ruby when you're familiar with Python is no big deal. I would just stick with it

Since then, I've been working more and more with TidalCycles. TidalCycles is an open-source live coding framework for creating patterns written in Haskell. TidalCycles uses SuperCollider on the backend, another language I've been using for live coding. Recently, I started using Tidal Looper for live vocal processing. This blog post will walk you through what you need to get started with vocal looping with Tidal Looper.

So you’re wondering what would making music with code look like? The tools I’m familiar with are TidalCycles, Sonic Pi, and SuperCollider. I’m having a hard time describing what it’s like to make music with tools like these so here’s a video of a performance. One person is live coding the music and the other is live coding the visuals. I think it’s super cool how the music is improvised and built over time by layering commands. Some keywords you could search to see more examples would be Algorave and Livecoding.

https://tidalcycles.org/ is another great example, parsing patterns of text and printing live music.

For sound live coding/algorave sonic pi and tidal cycles are great, both based on supercollider.

I don't know the alternatives but I'm a big fan of https://tidalcycles.org/. People really do crazy things, check out the videos on the front page.

I love when 2 DJs live-code together (on the same document! Editing each other's loops) or when a VJ live-codes some visuals in reaction to the DJ live-coding the music.

If you're interested in ChuCK, there's also Pure Data (a FOSS cousin of the commercial Max/MSP) and SuperCollider and a lot of live coding algorave sorta music things are built on top of SuperCollider like TidalCycles so you can execute lines of code live via a REPL or evaluating blocks of code in a document and generate beats in realtime.

Tidal Cycles! https://tidalcycles.org/

As layer8 mentioned, it is technically Haskell but more specifically a DSL and environment for live coding music.

Pretty fun to play around with!

After digging deeper, I've found TidalCycles tidalcycles.org and that's my favorite Livecoding software. Now you can start programming music without any cost.