Programming As An Expressive Instrument (with Sam Aaron)

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. -- 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 Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins – 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