Fall has officially arrived and the kids wore balaclavas and mitts for the morning bike rides. I suffered one day when I chose to wear a t-shirt. Those Nova Scotian winds can be harsh.
Recently I discovered generative music, which is described as music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system. A common place to hear this type of music is an Algorave, which sounds like an absolutely incredible night! There seems to be a community around these events, as live dates continue to pop up. Sadly, none in Canada, but to be fair, I'm not going to be staying up past 10pm any time soon :-)
The discovery began on TikTok, which I continue to curate to bring me the ideal 15 minute couch session. (the algorithm can work for you, but it does take discipline and lots of tuning!) There, I stumbled on two creators:
Both are operating at another level. This is mastery of not only the programming language but music theory. They are also really fun to listen to! In particular, I enjoy how Switch Angel's descriptions of what they are building act its own sort of background music.
The music is created through a platform known as strudel. I lack any music theory, but I popped open some of those TikTok videos and began writing some code (strudel repl happens to have some vim bindings, nice!)
It's really fun. I enjoy the visuals you get out of box (via punchcard) and the
variation you can produce is pretty vast.
All this reminded me of a conference talk by Sam Aaron, who I was lucky to see speak at GOTO Chicago back in 2018. The linked is from a different conference, but same idea. His talk spoke to choices within the school curriculum (from his home country) and the possibilities of education through live coding & music. Today, his talk remains relevant and I think even more interesting now that our youth are growing up more closely with computers!
I don't anticipate becoming a algorave coder, but I have been enjoying popping in and out of strudel to try things out. I found the following as other interesting projects in this space:
- Csound
- supercollider
- faust
- https://sonic-pi.net/ (per Sam's video above)