Sonic Pi VS FoxDot

I have wondered what grooves it could come with using https://sonic-pi.net/

Something fascinating about seeing a 'score' for generative music written out as a sort of specification like that.

There's enough detail there that you can take those instructions and reimplement your own version of it, and you'll end up with essentially the same 'piece of music', but certainly a different interpretation of it. Because while the score lays out some details precisely, it leaves other choices less clear. What does 'all inversions' really mean when enumerating chords? Does it include open, spread voicings? What durations should we choose from for our random waveforms? How short is 'short' when deciding to repeat? And of course, what wave synths should you use, and how should you modulate them?

All those are similar to the decisions a traditional instrumentalist makes when interpreting a sheet music score for performance - here, a generative music coder can follow this 'score' and produce a program that represents their own interpretation of the piece.

Coding it up in Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net/) was a fun exercise, and I feel like I was able to produce something along the lines of what the composer intended. It carries the same kind of mood that the recording in the video has. But it's my own 'performance' of the work, if that makes sense (even if it's actually Sonic Pi 'performing' it at runtime...)

All of which got me thinking about the relationship more generally between specification, and implementation. Considering different programmers' implementations of algorithms as individual 'performances' of scores from the overall design - and then thinking about developers building elements of a larger system architecture as individual performers working to deliver their part of the performance as part of a band or orchestra. Some groups, maybe they're directed by a conductor-architect; others maybe are improvisers, riffing off one another and occasionally stepping up to deliver a solo. And some are maybe solid session performers, showing up and delivering strong but unflashy performances to a producer's specification.

So overall, a nice meditative coding exercise for a Sunday afternoon, and a shift in perspective. Thanks for sharing it.

On a seriously light-hearted note, Herve Aniglo, talked about teaching children to code with music using Sonic PI, a language agnostic platform that helps you learn recursions, looping, circuit breaking and functional programming by creating simple tunes.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPYzvS8A_rTYEba_4SDvR...

- Sonic Pi is built on-top of SuperCollider, but it's MUCH easier to get started with making bleeps and bloops. Sam Aaron, who originally created Overtone (a Clojure front-end for SuperCollider) created Sonic Pi initially to teach kids computer programming and music, but now it's turning into a pretty nice live-coding setup. The language is basically a DSL extension of Ruby, and although it's very elegant, I feel like it's a little nerfed in terms of a full language when compared to SCLang, so I'm sticking with the latter for now. High recommend checking it out if you're new to making music or code. https://sonic-pi.net/

- This 'Intro To Live Coding' vid from Alex McLean is great. Gives a good overview of a few fun tools out there that I won't mention here for sake of time (check out Gibber and Hydra for web-based coding things. Gibber is really slick). Alex invented Tidal Cycles, which I feel is like god-tier in terms of power and conciseness. Maybe I'll tinker with Tidal someday, but I want to start with SC.

Strange dice that it seems to mostly be c++, sponsored by 3 prominent elixir shops, with an original OSC server implementation by Joe Armstrong.

https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/tree/dev/app/server...

There is a programming language+IDE called SonicPI. It's designed to create music by writing code. You can install the program from the lin, then ask chatGPT to generate some sonic PI code that produces some nice melody. Then just copy the code and paste it into the sonicPI program, and run it by clicking the run button. Here's a conversation for example

Thanks! I used a python library called Foxdot: https://foxdot.org/

My comment won't really be helpful, but it feels like an interesting question to spitball some thoughts...

1. The domain is super important for children's programming. Logo started out doing list processing and word-based games and kids just weren't that into it; it's the turtle that really made it feel real and exciting. Scratch similarly has a really concrete and fun domain (moving sprites). The exact things that good learning environments have (lots of visuals and movement) don't seem very fun when you are blind (though maybe there's ways to experience that output that I'm not aware of).

2. My natural intuition is that voice and music are fun. Maybe there's tactile things I am unaware of. Maybe Lego Mindstorms?

3. FoxDot is a really fun programming environment for creating live music: https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot – it's very textual, and I'm not sure how easy that is (especially if you are trying to interact while the music is playing). It's based on Supercollider: https://supercollider.github.io/ – it's possible there's other more accessible frontends for Supercollider.

4. Here's something someone did with Supercollider: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-technology-set-up-a-...

5. That reminds me of Makey Makey, which is very tactile and very affordable. But it's basically just an input device. https://makeymakey.com/ – really you can't go wrong getting that and hooking it up to a sound player or having the kid find new and inventive ways to create tactile frontends to it. I'm sure other kids will be impressed with what this kid comes up with. Here's a page on using it with blind kids: https://www.perkins.org/resource/makey-makey-stem-activities...

6. It's OK if it's not "programming" IMHO. Building things with computers is fun and good learning. Giving the kid a new medium to build things is important, with or without complicated logic. I think there is a benefit to what I'll call more inclusively "coding" which is representing your goals and thoughts in some special format, like HTML or music notation or whatever.

7. Speech input and output in the browser is pretty easy and accessible. But I don't know of anything that brings all that together in a programming-like experience. Using GPT I bet there's something possible and not super complicated that could be created today that couldn't have happened a year ago.

FoxDot is probably what you're looking for.

https://foxdot.org/

As for software, I think the 2 most popular live coding environments are FoxDot (which is Python based and works well with Troop), and Sonic Pi (which I don't think has "multiplayer"). Its been a while since I looked into this style of beat making, so maybe things have changed. But these are good places to start.

PureData is a hell of a rabbit hole! You might also want to check out SuperCollider which is more modern. If you want to skip to the fun stuff there's FoxDot and SonicPi. Both are live coding environments built on SuperCollider.

If you want more info on how to code music in python check our website [crashserver.fr] or [FoxDot] - main project in python

you can make cool music with FoxDot and Supercollider

FoxDot

Not sure how they compare feature-wise, but take a look at FoxDot:

https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot