Sam Aaron is the creator of Sonic Pi, one of the most unusual software platforms you’ll encounter. It’s a live-coding playground for making music. A tool that lets you write code that defines sounds and musical phrases, and build up a hole program that plays anything from a short bleep to a whole nightclub set. And Sam’s creator has been using it live for years, weaving drum & bass nights out of thin air, all driven by the Ruby-esque he writes.
In this episode we go through Sam’s career path and design journey as we look at what it takes to make a programming language with enough expressivity and productivity to produce music at the speed of Sam’s imagination.
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Sam’s Sonic Pi Course: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-introductory-115404746
Sonic Pi: https://sonic-pi.net/
SuperCollider: https://supercollider.github.io/
Overtone: https://github.com/overtone/overtone
Power Gloves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove
Web Audio API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API
Tau5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/announcing-sonic-112605951
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Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins
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0:00 Intro
2:31 How Did Sam Become A Computer Musician?
8:32 What Is SuperCollider?
14:17 Concurrent Programming For Bands
15:10 The Birth Of Sonic Pi
20:26 Early Days On Tour
22:37 Live Coding As A Language Design Influence
25:09 How Do You Practice?
26:01 Coding As An Act Of Human Expression
31:29 What Do Live Coding Systems Need?
38:44 Simplicity Needn’t Be Limiting
46:20 The Really Hard Part Of Teaching
56:55 Teachable Concurrency
1:01:58 Erlang As The Future
1:07:07 What's The Future Of Sonic Pi?
1:16:07 The Latency Problem
1:28:26 How Do You Learn Sonic Pi Well?
1:42:16 How Do We Fund Open Source?
1:48:41 Outro