Ruby
Live Code Music
Summarized using AI
Live Code Music
by Nicolas DermineThe video titled "Live Code Music" features Nicolas Dermine as the speaker at the wroc_love.rb 2015 event. The main focus of the talk is Sonic Pi, a software that allows users to generate music through coding in Ruby. Dermine opens with an introduction about the significance of the day being Pi Day, aligning it humorously with the name of the software. He engages the audience with questions about their experiences in coding and music to gauge their familiarity with Sonic Pi.
Key Points Discussed:
- Sonic Pi Introduction: Dermine explains that Sonic Pi is designed for live coding music, enabling users to write code and produce sound dynamically.
- History of Sonic Pi: The origin story is shared, detailing how the creator Sam Aaron was inspired to create Sonic Pi for a classroom setting to excite students about programming through music.
- Fun and Educational Uses: Dermine emphasizes that Sonic Pi is not only a fun tool but also an educational platform. It encourages creativity in coding and music-making, making it suitable for both children and adults.
- Programming Basics: The software allows users to learn basic programming concepts through its interface, where users can experiment with Ruby code to create musical sequences.
- Live Coding Features: He delves into the live coding capabilities of Sonic Pi, explaining how threads and loops can allow for simultaneous musical elements, enhancing live performances.
- Interactive Demonstration: Dermine conducts a demo by playing a music guessing game with the audience, showcasing the simplicity of Sonic Pi's command structure with MIDI notes.
- Further Exploration: The speaker encourages viewers to explore the documentation available within the Sonic Pi software for deeper understanding and creative potential.
In conclusion, Dermine advocates for Sonic Pi as an effective tool for both learning programming and creating music. The software’s user-friendly approach makes it accessible to all, fostering a delightful and challenging environment for musicians and coders alike. Dermine wraps up the session by inviting questions from the audience and reinforcing the idea that Sonic Pi is a platform for experimentation and creativity.
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And now, please welcome Nico. Thank you.
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The music you're hearing now, or the noise, depending on your sensibility,
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is generated entirely by code that you see here. I hope you can see it sort of okay.
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So you write code in Ruby and you get music out when you execute it.
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This software is called Sonic Pi. I'll let your ears rest a little bit.
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There are many things that can go wrong in this talk because you'll have to read,
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well, if you want to code on the screen and listen to music over the speakers.
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We'll see how it goes. Today is a special day, and does anybody know what today's date is?
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Today's date is special: it's Pi Day! Yeah, I didn't know about that,
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but I read a tweet by Corey Haynes two days ago, and he mentioned today was going to be Pi Day.
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Is the software called Sonic Pi a coincidence? I don't know. Pi is a number, as you all know, and it has many digits.
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If you separate the digits, you get today's date. Let's keep this in mind.
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And we have the time as well, so I don't know who made the schedule, but I'm sure it was a very intelligent person.
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Subsonic Pi, that's maybe the logo of Sonic Pi. As I said, it's a piece of software that allows you to create music by writing code in Ruby.
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OK, I'd like to start with some questions too, because I made some assumptions about you and what you know about Sonic Pi.
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But I'd like to finally see if they were accurate. First of all, please raise your hand if it has ever happened to you that you enjoyed writing code.
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Ah, not everybody? Really? Okay, sometimes? At least I hope it's often.
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Now please raise your hand if you sometimes enjoy creating music—perhaps you might play an instrument or sing, maybe in the shower.
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Okay, less people. Best of some. Now please raise your hand if you've already heard of Sonic Pi before.
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Ah, very few people, but it's in the program. Did you read the program at all? No? Okay, you're not here for the talks, maybe.
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So out of the few that raised their hand, did you try Sonic Pi? One person? Two? Wow! And out of those two, did you try it enough to be comfortable with it? Or just a little bit?
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Just a little bit? Okay, so that fits more or less my assumptions. In this talk, I'd like to briefly tell you the story of how Sonic Pi was created and why it was created.
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Then I'll try to show you reasons why you might want to use it, even if you didn't raise your hand when I asked if you liked creating music.
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But you enjoy writing code, so there’s still hope there.
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Finally, I'd like to show you in the app how to get started—the basics of how to put everything together to create music.
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Can you hear me okay in the back? Can you understand what I'm saying? Yeah? Okay.
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Don’t hesitate to stop me if you don’t understand something. Here’s the story. Back in November, only four months ago, I saw a tweet by James.
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He asked very politely if I could watch a talk, along with every other programmer. It was a talk at the Strange Loop conference last summer.
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Called 'Our Shared Programming,' it was given by Karen Meyer and Sam Aaron.
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They discussed various topics, and then they had a demo with live music and robots dancing to the music.
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Did anybody watch this talk or video? For the others, I encourage you to watch it.
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I was really moved by the talk at moments. It was a really interesting talk.
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That’s where I learned about Sam, the creator of Sonic Pi. He lives in the UK.
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He describes himself as a live coder. When I watched this talk for me, live coding was this thing that you’re not supposed to do at a conference.
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It’s risky because it’s hard to pull it off. Like Ryan said this morning, many things can go wrong.
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But Sam has a different perspective. For him, the live coder codes music. He’ll be at a computer, writing some code, tweaking the code.
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Every now and then, the code is reloaded, and music comes out of the speakers. There’s an audience.
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The code is projected on screen, often with visual effects in the background. For people like me, it looks pretty cool.
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If you look at the code, you might notice that it’s not Ruby. At the time, he used a Clojure library called Overtone.
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He was part of the core team of Overtone. Well, he was part of the core team.
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One day, a teacher came to Sam and said, 'I really love what you're doing with this live music coding thing. It looks really cool.'
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He mentioned he had a group of students who were going to learn about programming on the Raspberry Pi.
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I’m sure everybody knows what a Raspberry Pi is—it’s a small computer.
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The teacher asked Sam, 'When I see what you're doing, it’s such a cool environment. You seem to have so much fun with that.
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I wonder if my students could learn programming in such a fun way that they would get excited about learning.
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They might think programming isn't boring, and they might learn better.'
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So she asked Sam what he thought about that, and he said he thought it was a really good idea.
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He said he would see what he could do and he tried to load Overtone on the Raspberry Pi.
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However, it was pretty slow to boot at the time, and on top of that, he knew that when you're talking to an audience,
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it’s very hard to give more than a little bite of information at a time, especially to a class of young students.
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So he thought teaching them programming in Clojure through Emacs would be a little bit difficult.
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That’s why he had the idea to create something new, and that’s how Sonic Pi was born.
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He worked for three weeks on the project to get a first version out.
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The students tried it out—they had fun. It was a very good experience for them.
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That’s how Sonic Pi was born. Seeing how excited the students were learning with the tool,
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Sam thought it would be a great tool for teaching programming and music simultaneously.
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For him, as a live coder, he felt something was missing because he couldn’t use it for his own live performances. It was still too much of a toy.
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That’s why he wrote a second version, adding many features he needed for his own live coding music performances.
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From the second version of Sonic Pi, you have capabilities of live coding, and that's what we’ll look at in a moment.
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That's it for the story. The project is free and open-source; you can find it on GitHub.
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There’s a version for the Raspberry Pi, but also for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
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If you want to try it out, the platform shouldn't be a problem. There's a little core team assembling around Sam to help with different platforms and new features.
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Now I'd like to list four reasons why you might want to use Sonic Pi. They're quite different.
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One reason is not really a reason, but I've been playing with Sonic Pi live for four months—most days.
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And it's a ton of fun. Even though I'm not a good live coder and don't know much about electronic music,
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I find it really enjoyable to play some notes and see how they interact.
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I enjoy playing a loop, adding effects, and creating random numbers to make things more interesting.
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I’ll try to show you that afterwards.
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I have children, and I shared Sonic Pi with my daughters a little bit. It's great seeing their excitement.
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They grasp concepts like, 'Oh, you could put this in a loop and run it a thousand times!' and they're really excited about it.
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For us, it’s normal programming, but for them, you see this excitement.
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That’s where I see many possibilities in this tool. If you enjoy teaching, it's a really fun environment.
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An obvious reason to use Sonic Pi would be to create music. If you have a game, you might want to create a background music track.
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If you have a podcast, you could create a jingle or an introduction. You could compose music and record it.
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You could play live. There are two ways of playing: you can program the whole music and play it in one go,
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or you can live code, edit it, and have it reload while taking the changes into account.
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So if you're DJing at a party, you could live code for fun.
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You could record that and share it, and you could even play with other people using instruments.
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Another reason to learn with Sonic Pi is that if you don’t know anything about programming, you could learn about programming just by following the tutorial.
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You could learn about music. If you know programming but not Ruby, you could learn about Ruby because it uses Ruby.
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You can learn about music synthesizers and how they're made if you want to dig deeper.
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If you're interested in teaching, you could teach with Sonic Pi as well.
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Here's a question for you: have you ever been asked by someone if you could teach them programming?
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Not that many people? Well, maybe you're asleep already.
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I find it really hard. Like we talked about with Rails Girls, after two days they can build a web app with Rails, and that's impressive.
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But I find that when you have someone who is new, you want to give them something interesting.
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If you give them something too hard, they might feel overwhelmed by the complexity.
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And they might think that programming is not for them.
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So now, we’ll look at the app and the code. You have one graphical user interface with a single code editor window.
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The white part is just the code editor, there are buttons to run and stop the execution.
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There's a help system with a tutorial, code examples, and documentation for synthesizers, effects, samples, and all the functions available in Sonic Pi.
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The environment is pretty contained. You write code only in Ruby in one place.
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There's no need for 20 files; it's all in one code editor window.
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This creates a very tight feedback loop; you write a line of code, run it, and you can hear if it sounds like what you expected or not.
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So it's a simpler environment—it can be easier and safer to learn programming that way.
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If you want to teach programming, if you have kids, or if someday you have kids, you might want to sit down with them.
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You could follow the tutorial or, if you know a little bit about Sonic Pi, teach them yourself.
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By following the tutorial, you'll be exposed to all the programming concepts that we use as programmers.
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You’ll learn about functions, variables, parameters, conditionals, iterations,
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random numbers, and even concurrency and threads, which is very interesting in music to have things playing in parallel.
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Let’s look at what the code looks like. When Sam started this up, he wanted it to be as simple as possible for beginners.
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If you want to play a note, you can type 'play 60' and run it.
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This will play a note (60) as a MIDI note.
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If you're a musician, that might not resonate, but it's about a note in the middle of the piano—C if you know the ABC notation.
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Higher integers yield higher notes while lower numbers yield lower notes on the piano.
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It’s simple to play a note; it might not be the most beautiful sound in the world, but it’s a synthesizer.
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I’ll show you how to change synthesizers in a moment. Now I'd like to play a little game with you.
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I don't have a TV, but my in-laws do, and I live in Poland.
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They often watch a game called 'Jak to Melodia,' which I guess every country has its type of game.
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Participants must guess the title of a song by hearing a couple of notes.
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So I’d like to play that with you. It’s very hard because I won’t tell you the artist.
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In the game, they know which artist plays the song, but I won’t tell you.
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So it may be too hard to guess, but I’ll play three notes.
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We learned about the play function, so let’s see what happens.
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If I play a note like this, coming from a PHP background, I'm assuming, of course,
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that the second note should play after the first. But no—the calls to play a trigger sound, and if you don’t tell Sonic Pi to sleep,
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it plays everything simultaneously.
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This gives you a chord, which is very useful in music. If you want to play a melody,
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you have to tell Sonic Pi how long to wait between every note.
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For example, we can set a sleep for one beat.
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By default, you have 60 beats per minute in Sonic Pi, which you can change.
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Now, I’d like to ask an American participant to play this song.
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Thanks, Jim! You’ve already heard it four times, but I’ll play it once more.
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I didn’t choose an American by chance. Maybe you've already guessed the song; maybe not.
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It's alright if you don't; it's very hard to guess a song with just three notes.
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Now, was that close? American Anthem? Yes, the Star-Spangled Banner!
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It’s normal; it’s really not easy. But when we reflect a bit,
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we see that we can create chords and melodies with just those two functions.
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For me, I wouldn’t want to do it that way; it would be cumbersome to calculate the spacing between the notes.
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But with Sonic Pi, we also have the functions documented in the help system.
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I won’t mention too many functions today, just five or six, which is enough to get started and have fun.
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When you try this out, you can see what those other functions do.
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Sonic Pi provides an API. My point is that you have Ruby available for programming how those notes play.
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When I learned about that, I was intrigued—it's programming!
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It’s not that different from using a library, but it's applied to music.
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It’s easy to share what you find—your code. You can just copy and paste it on GitHub and share it on Twitter.
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You could make open-source music. How cool is that!
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To illustrate how to use Ruby, we could write loops to avoid excessive copying and pasting.
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Here, I’d play the same note three times. Sonic Pi provides a function called 'scale'.
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You probably know what a scale is; it’s just a set of notes.
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You can generate various crazy scales from just the fundamental note.
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You can experiment with the notes and create interesting compositions.
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Now, back to our game, I have a song in mind, but I'm sorry,
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only Polish people may know it better—maybe parents will do better.
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So if there's anyone who wants to join me, go ahead, but if not, I’ll just play it.
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If anyone knows the song, we’ll see.
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Good—so you see, you're a good audience. It’s a lullaby involving two small kittens.
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Notice I said we would play three random notes, but the seed will always be the same.
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You'll be guaranteed to have the same sequence. If you want to change the sequence, you can set a different seed.
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We can play this in a loop as well.
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My children love it when it plays indefinitely!
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Now I want to introduce live coding; a basic loop is nice but if I update and run it repeatedly,
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the old code continues executing while I make the new changes.
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With Sonic Pi, you can use the 'in_thread' function for composing music, especially if you're not live coding.
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You can place your code in a 'thread', allowing simultaneous loops.
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Now, we can add extra threads for more complex sound.
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This is key—if you want to have things in parallel, you'll need to use this 'in_thread' function.
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You pass it a block, and you’ll have independent functions running alongside.
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The 'live_loop' function really helps out with seamless coding.
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If you give it a name, it will allow you to see error messages.
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Now, when we make a change and reload, the current code continues until the end of that iteration.
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It starts over with the new code after that.
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You can tweak things around and play with them endlessly.
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You’ll be able to have multiple live loops running.
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Now, let’s not just play a melody; we can explore various additional functions.
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For example, let’s play a basic note and sleep for a beat or more.
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If I turn up the volume, tell me if it's too loud.
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So far, we got lucky—let's adjust the beat.
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Now we need to see how the sync function operates.
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The sync function works like event emitters; it allows you to interrupt and react.
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Now we have a way to ensure that loops remain nicely synchronized.
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That’s it for now. We’ve seen a few essential functions, enough to have fun.
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There are many synth features and sound effects that Sonic Pi offers.
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You could create different types of synthesizers and sounds.
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If you type Control-I on any function, you'll find doc links for the synthesizer.
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The help system details the synthesizers and their parameters for adjusting sounds.
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You can explore the different dimensions to change your music.
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So using Sonic Pi gives you many ways to create sounds with synthesizers.
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Another exciting way is to use samples. You can sound samples using the sample function.
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Sonic Pi comes with public domain samples, and you can add your recordings.
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By calling the sample function, you can mix and play different audio.
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Let’s try playing a bass sound from the samples.
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And there’s a snare sound, let me see if you can hear it.
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Most of these may play at the same time, though it's not always nice.
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To add variations, you can use randomness.
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After playing around with the sounds, you could combine them to create a drum set.
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We have random elements to keep everything fresh and engaging.
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Just by changing the speed or manipulating the samples, you create different beats.
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You can use playback rates to double the frequency, allowing unique sound variations.
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Again, adjusting the randomness can lead to exciting and unpredictable results.
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That’s how you can have various dimensions of sound and create unique music.
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I mentioned earlier a lot of features Sonic Pi has and how it can facilitate your code.
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We've seen ways to combine the sounds and how to change the output for different effects.
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I hope you find it a fun project to play with, and I encourage you to explore the tutorials.
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You could share your findings, any interesting experiments or music you create.
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I think that’s it. Thank you for your attention.
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Thank you, Nico!
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Does anybody have any questions?
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I was thinking about this while preparing the talk. During my preparations,
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I would run every morning, gradually increasing my running time—running more each time.
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I noticed my talk was becoming longer and longer. I was a bit worried when it took an hour and a half.
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This brings me to testing and the live loop functions.
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The last part is quick feedback loops, checking if your code works.
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But it’s about the response of your code through iterations.
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Just remember, our ears are great—we can quickly tell when something isn’t right.
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Does that make sense to everyone?
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I noticed you used the number 60 in the beginning to express the note.
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What's the reason behind those numbers? Is it MIDI?
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Yes! It’s a MIDI number, indeed. One last question, anyone?
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This might be a challenging one. Have you seen Brett Victor's talks?
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His recent discussions highlight when using different expressions can be better than code.
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In music, we have tools like Max and Ableton Live where musicians use live coding.
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I enjoy Sonic Pi for teaching and having fun, but do you think it’s more expressive than those tools?
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I don't know, as I'm not familiar with those tools. I can’t definitively say.
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Creating professional music typically requires advanced tools and effects.
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But Sonic Pi is great for teaching, having fun, and playing live.
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With that, I don't know their electronic scene, which hinders my input.
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Alright, thank you very much!
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