Sonic Pi VS faust

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

Glicol looks very cool! Also check out Faust if you haven't (https://faust.grame.fr), another FP sound programming language.

The linked (https://github.com/grame-cncm/faust) looks reasonable to me.

Chata probably needs to work out roughly what the semantics of the language should be. Its good to know what the library support is intended to be as that informs language design (assuming the library is to be implemented in chata anyway). Quite a lot of this page is about syntax.

There are some design decisions that have deep impact on programming languages. Reflection, mutation, memory management, control flow, concurrency. There are some implementation choices that end up constraining the language spec - python seems full of these.

Echoing p4bl0, implementing the language will change the spec. Writing a spec up front might be an interesting exercise anyway. I'd encourage doing both at the same time - sometimes describe what a feature should be and then implement it, sometimes implement something as best you can and then describe what you've got.

Implementation language will affect how long it takes to get something working, how good the thing will be and what you'll think about along the way. The usual guidance is to write in something familiar to you, ideally with pattern matching as compilers do a lot of DAG transforms.

- I'd say that writing a language in C took me ages and forced me to really carefully think through the data representation.

- Writing one in lua took very little time but the implementation was shaky, probably because it let me handwave a lot of the details.

- Writing a language in itself, from a baseline of not really having anything working, makes for very confusing debugging and (eventually) a totally clear understanding of the language semantics.

Good luck with the project.

Faust integration would be awesome: https://faust.grame.fr Then again we have MaxMSP, so in the end it feels kind of redundant

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

Have a look at FAUST as well: https://faust.grame.fr/

Once you have an idea of basic programming practice, you need to learn some DSP programming. One of the better tools for this is Faust https://faust.grame.fr/ , bear in mind this is a functional programming language, and has very different syntax to C++, but the same principles apply.