I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.
Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.
So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.
Every generation of musicians for the past 8 decades has had the same thoughts. What live coding tools for synthesis offers you is an understanding of the nature of generational technology.
Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?
This is happening for the kids, again.
Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.
Music coding technology has been around a long time - think of tools like csound and pd and Max/MSP. They're great for coding synthesizers. Nobody uses them to do songs. Even Strudel has tools for basic GUI components because once you get past the novelty of 'this line of code is modulating the filter wowow' typing in numeric values for frequency or note duration is the least efficient way to interact with the machine.
Pro developers who really care about the sound variously write in C/C++ or use cross compilers for pd or Max. High quality oscillators, filters, reverb etc are hard work, although you can certainly get very good results with basic ones given today's fast processors.
Live coding is better for conditionals like 'every time [note] is played increment [counter], when [counter] > 15 reset [counter] to 0 and trigger [something else]'. But people who are focused on the result rather than the live coding performance tend to either make their own custom tooling (Autechre) or programmable Eurorack modules that integrate into a larger setup, eg https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/the-programmable-euror...
It's not that you can't get great musical results via coding, of course you can. But coding as performance is a celebration of the repl, not of the music per se.
Look into the JUCE framework for building your own tools. I was using MaxMsp for a while, but would always think to myself "This would be so much easier to accomplish in pure code". So, I started building some bespoke VST's.
There's a learning curve for sure, but it's not too bad once you learn the basics of how audio and MIDI are handled + general JUCE application structure.
Two tips:
Don't bother with the Projucer, use the CMAke example to get going. Especially if you don't use XCode or Visual Studio.
If your on a Mac, you might need to self-sign the VST. I don't remember the exact process, but it's something I had to do once I got an M4 Mac.
I haven't really found anything yet that Gemini can't do in python for this.
LLMs have absolutely killed any interest I use to have in the max/pd/reaktor wiring up boxes UI.
I have really gone further though and thought why do I even care about VST or a DAW or anything like this? Why not break completely free of everything?
I take inspiration from Trevor Wishart and the Composers Desktop Project for this. Wishart's music could only really be made with his own tools.
It is easy to sound original when using a tool no one else has.
For a great example of some (non-live) coded music, I would recommend The Haywire Frontier by Nathan Ho [0]. The whole album was sequenced and synthesized entirely in SuperCollider with no samples, external hardware, or third-party plugins. It's really interesting and a crazy achievement, definitely worth a listen.
For live coding, Switch Angel is definitely someone I would actually go to see live, check out this video of hers [1].
> I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
Aside from the novelty factor (due to very different UI/UX) and the idea that you can use generative code to make music (which became an even more interesting factor in the age of LLMs), I agree.
And even the generative code part I mentioned is a novelty factor as well, and isn't really practical for someone who actually makes music as their end-goal (and not someone who is just experimenting around with tech or how far one can get with music-as-code UIUX).
I feel like the newer (ish) tools such as Strudel, and also this here Loopmaster, have a much better toolset for producing stuff that actually sounds great (vs just purely the novelty of "look im coding beats"). Like, Strudel comes with an extensive sample bank of actually quality samples (vs relying on synthesis out of some sense of purity), and also comes with lots of very decent sounding effects and filters and the likes.
Combine that with the ability to do generative stuff in a way that Ableton, FL Studio or Renoise are never going to get you, I won't be surprised if people invent some cool new genres with these tools eventually.
Basically, your comment reads a bit like saying demoscene makes no sense because you can make any video better with Blender and DaVinci Resolve. And this obviously isn't true given the sheer overload of spectacularly great demos out there whose unique esthetic was easy to obtain because they're code, not video. (find "cdak" by Quite for an on-the-nose example).
I'm going to be surprised if this new wave of music coding tools will not result in some madly weird new electronic music genres.
Obviously there's plenty of stuff these tools are terrible for (like your example of nuanced instrument parts), but don't dismiss the kinds of things they're going to turn out to be amazing at.
What I like in comparison to sample-based software like Tidal and Strudel is exactly the ability to create very novel and interesting sounds using synthesis, something which I prefer. Genres like Techno rely a lot on timbre novelty.
I think this format of composition is going to encourage a highly repetitive structure to your music. Good programming languages constrain and prevent the construction of bad programs. Applying that to music is effectively going to give you quantization of every dimension of composition.
I'm sure its possible to break out of that but you are fighting an uphill battle.
Quite the opposite actually. certain live coding languages give you the tools to create extremely complex patterns in a very controlled manner, in ways you simply wouldn't be able to do via any other method. the most popular artist exploring these ideas is Kindohm, who is sort of an ambassador figure for the TidalCycles language.
Having used TidalCycles myself, the language lends itself particularly well to this kind of stuff as opposed to more traditional song/track structures. And yet it also constrains and prevents the construction of bad programs in a very strict manner via its type system and compiler.
It's also notable for being probably the only Haskell library used almost exclusively by people with no prior knowledge of Haskell, which is an insane feat in itself.
Some of us enjoy highly repetitive music, at least some of the time.
"Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." -- Marcus Brigstocke (probably?)
Also, related but not - YouTube's algorithm gave me this the other day - showing how to reconstruct the beat of Blue Monday by New Order:
I've suspected that, too, while looking at DAWs and how people make music with them. It seems a bit boring to me.
To kinda get away from that or even just experiment, I was interested in the possibility of writing music with code and either inject randomness in places or at least vary the intervals between beats/etc using some other functions (which would again just be layering in patterns, but in a more subtle way).
Procedural generation can be useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. Imagine using cellular automata or physics simulations to trigger notes, key changes, etc. Turing completeness means there are no limits on what you can generate. Some DAWs and VSTs give you a Turing complete environment, e.g. Bitwig's grid or Max/MSP. But for someone with a programming background those kinds of visual editors are less intuitive and less productive than writing code.
Of course, often creativity comes from limitations. I would agree that it's usually not desirable to go full procedural generation, especially when you want to wrangle something into the structure of a song. I think the best approach is a hybrid one, where procedural generation is used to generate certain ideas and sounds, and then those are brought into a more traditional DAW-like environment.
I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.
Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.
These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.
A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.
I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.
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As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.
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To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.
I see it as a neat way for nerds to nerd out about nerd stuff in an experiential way. Like, this is not going to headline a big time rave or festival or anything, but in a community of people who like math or programming or science, sure, why not introduce this kind of performance as another little celebration of their hobby?
Years ago I went to a sci-fi convention for the first time, because I had moved to a new town and didn't know anyone, and I like sci-fi. I realized when I was there that despite me growing up reading Hugo and Nebula award winners, despite watching pretty much every sci-fi show on TV, despite being a full-time computer nerd, the folks who go to sci-fi conventions are a whole nother subculture again. They have their own heroes, their own in-jokes, their own jargon... and even their own form of music! It's made by people in the community for the community and it misses the point to judge it by "objective" standards from the outside, because it's not about trying to make "interesting music" or write the best song of all time. The music made in that context is not being made as an end in itself, or even as the focus of the event, it's just a mechanism to enable a quirky subculture to hang out and bond in a way that's fun for them. I see this kind of live coded music as fulfilling a similar role in a different subculture. Maybe it's not for you, but that's fine.
Fair point, and that's the challenge in both the software's abilities and the creator's skills.
If you see it as yet another instrument you have to master, then you can go pretty far. I'm finding myself exploring rhythms and sounds in ways I could never do in a DAW so fast, but at the same time I do find limiting a lot of factors, especially sequencing.
So far I haven't gotten beyond a good sounding loop, hence the name "loopmaster", and maybe that's the limit, which is why I made a 2 deck "dual" mode in the editor, so that it can be played as a DJ set where you don't really need that much progression.
That said, it's quite fun to play with it and experiment with sounds, and whenever you make something you enjoy, you can export a certain length and use it as a track in your mix.
My goal is certainly to be able to create full length tracks with nuances and variations as you say, just not entirely sure how to integrate this into the format right now.
My wife's (and many other music-lovers') test for whether something counts as "real music" is whether they can perform it live (and sound as good as the recording). Music which is programmed doesn't count, as there's a lot of nuance that a skilled musician with an actual instrument can put into a performance in a split-second as they play.
If it moves and connects with you then it's real music.
It's fine to have a preference for live musicianship, but the 'real music' argument has been leveled against every new musical technology (remember the furore around Dylan going electric?). It dismisses contemporary creativity based on a traditionalist bias that elevates one form of execution above all others. There's also a huge amount of skill in producing good electronic music. It's always hard to make good music no matter the means.
It's a spectrum and people are free to draw the line wherever they want.
If you dial the dial high enough you can say that that amplifiers aren't "real music" because you are no longer hearing the "real instruments", but "a machine that is distorting the sound". If that's your line, then only listening to classical music at a concert hall would count as "real music".
You could dial it up even higher. Using a musical instrument at all is not "real music" any more, because human voice can have more nuance than any instrument. Then going to a church to listen to gregorian chants would be the only "real music".
I personally think that Daft Punk rocks, and for a lot of artists I very much prefer listening to their studio recording rather than listening to them in a concert. (Surrounded by ... people. Ugh.)
The nuance of a skilled player in the moment is a beautiful thing to behold, but saying programmed music isn't "real music" is like saying that film acting isn't real acting, but theater acting is.
It's like saying a novel isn't real speaking, but a speech is.
Like animating an image isn't real, but recording a video is.
If that's your preference, then that's alright. But it's a silly distinction to make.
here's a whole opera from a Star Trek episode I coded in Supercollider - can indeed code things other than EDM... (its a screen grab - being synthesized in real time)
the great advantage over DAWs etc is that you can name things and slowly build your own bespoke tools... for this work all timing was done in reference to the words rather than beats and bars - I can re-flow the whole piece by tapping through the syllables on my space-key. Something that would be totally impossible in a traditional platform!
I've seen a couple of TikToks with someone doing live coding with this same tool and it was really cool to watch because they really knew it well, but like you said it was bog-standard house/techno.
I find trackers to be in the same category you put live coding into, probably DAWs as well, but many people do some amazing things with all three. In the more academic computer music world there is a fair amount of diversity in live coding where it is generally combined with algorithmic/generative techniques to rapidly create complexity and nuance. SuperCollider seems to have the most interesting output here, for me at least; I have seen little that really grabs me but they do show the capabilities of the process and I find that quite interesting. Improvisation and jamming is just not my thing, so live coding falls a bit short for me.
It's not gonna add anything to your repertoire. It will appear so after some time but it's really just an approach for people who have bad hand-eye coordination and ability to hold a rhythm or a hard time acquiring these skills, or tinkering with DAWs, which have a weirdly annoying first hour use time/learning curve
What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].
Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.
Live coding music/visuals/art has been a fairly major subculture for over 15 years: https://blog.toplap.org/ Prior to that there was plenty of live/interactive code-based music going on within the computer music scene, HMSL (FORTH based)[1] and CLM (Lisp based)[2] come to mind.
Real-time sound synthesis was tough to live-code, or to run in real-time at all, prior to the faster personal computers of the early 90s. (The tracker scene obviously pre-dates this, but in that case the actual sound synthesis algorithms weren't live coded.) In fact, code-to-music dates back to 1951[3], or 1957[4], depending on your definitions. There is a large history of development by many computer musicians following on from Max Matthews' MUSIC-N. The Computer Music Tutorial[5] is a good source for the academic/research institutions/serious composers part of the picture.
CSOUND is the oldest code-2-music framework I know of, and that's been here since the 80's, so the concept is not new
The tools/frameworks have become more plentiful, approachable, and mature over the past 10-15 years, to the point where you can just go to strudel.cc and start coding music right from your browser.
The language certainly looks nice! Is it open source? I think it makes sense for this kind of tool, since it's inherently "hackery". I mean people who want to write music with code also probably want the ability to understand and modify any part of the stack, it's the nature of the audience.
Thanks! I tried to make it as familiar as possible, inspired by JS. It's not yet open-source, mainly because the source is a bit of a mess, but it will be once I tidy things up. Follow me on GitHub[0] for updates. Also that sounds to me like Tech-House/Electro-House :D Very nice!
Nice, that's the optimized version - sounds actually a little different than the original one it's derived from. (actually better which I didn't expect)
Original: https://dittytoy.net/ditty/24373308b4
I like how music recognition flags it as the original Jarre piece.
I first did stuff like this when I was a teen using a 6502 machine and a synth card - using white noise to make tshhh snares etc. All coded in 6502. The bible was Hal Chamberlin's Musical Application of Microprocessors.
Then of course we had games abusing the SID etc to make fantastic tunes and then came very procedural music in size coded PC and Amiga demo coding that underneath the hood were doing tiny synth work and sequencing very much like dittytoy etc.
Shadertoy even has procedural audio but it doesn't get used enough.
If you like old computers and are interested in live coding music then I highly recommend to check out this video (Making 8-bit Music From Scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC Prompt):
Then, on line 21, with `pat('[~ e3a3c4]*4',(trig,velocity,pitches)->`.
Change *4 to *2 and back to *4, to reduce the interval that the "Chords" play. If you do it real fast with your backspace + 2 or backspace + 4 key, you can change the chords in realtime, and kinda vibe with the beat a little bit.
Definitely recommend wearing headphones to hear the entire audio spectrum (aka bass).*
I'm considering a VST version but for now there is an Export Audio feature you can use to get a perfect audio loop to use with Ableton (or any other DAW) with oversampling up to 8x for great quality.
I was surprised at the audible difference it made to reset the RNG seed for the hi-hat noise function every time it triggered. I’m curious what the justification for doing this is—does the randomness arise from the geometry of the hi-hat itself and not the way you hit it? Is the idea to imitate the sound of sample-based percussion?
My understanding is that because it's a very small sample, it's basically a combination of a subset of sine waves, and because we're very sensitive to the nuances of high-pitched sounds, even small changes in that space make a lot of difference. Every RNG seed produces a different sounding hihat, and if you don't reset it, it continues producing different hihats, which is unnatural. Another explanation is also to resemble sample-based audio, but perhaps it's all of these things combined.
Yes, there is a `sidechain` function designed specifically for this. I wanted to keep this tutorial simple so I skipped a lot of mixing techniques or were left as an exercise to the reader, but I will try to cover those as well in future tutorials. Sign up to get notified for when they arrive!
For now you can see how it's done here[0] on line 139. I pretty much use it on every other track I've made as well.
If it was clipping it would show as red in the amplitude visualizer, however the bass does have a lot of energy and that might be the cause for the clipping you're hearing. You can multiply it by a factor to reduce its amplitude.
I think it's more of a red flag that they chose a name that's one letter away from a well-known site that sells music samples: https://www.loopmasters.com/
Not like a fringe unknown one, but one with over 20 years of history and now-owned by Beatport.
meh, if they were that worried about their brand, they should have bought up the variants of their domain plus TLDs. otherwise, they can't possibly be that concerned about their trademark.
I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.
Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.
So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.
Every generation of musicians for the past 8 decades has had the same thoughts. What live coding tools for synthesis offers you is an understanding of the nature of generational technology.
Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?
This is happening for the kids, again.
Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.
Music coding technology has been around a long time - think of tools like csound and pd and Max/MSP. They're great for coding synthesizers. Nobody uses them to do songs. Even Strudel has tools for basic GUI components because once you get past the novelty of 'this line of code is modulating the filter wowow' typing in numeric values for frequency or note duration is the least efficient way to interact with the machine.
Pro developers who really care about the sound variously write in C/C++ or use cross compilers for pd or Max. High quality oscillators, filters, reverb etc are hard work, although you can certainly get very good results with basic ones given today's fast processors.
Live coding is better for conditionals like 'every time [note] is played increment [counter], when [counter] > 15 reset [counter] to 0 and trigger [something else]'. But people who are focused on the result rather than the live coding performance tend to either make their own custom tooling (Autechre) or programmable Eurorack modules that integrate into a larger setup, eg https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/the-programmable-euror...
It's not that you can't get great musical results via coding, of course you can. But coding as performance is a celebration of the repl, not of the music per se.
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Look into the JUCE framework for building your own tools. I was using MaxMsp for a while, but would always think to myself "This would be so much easier to accomplish in pure code". So, I started building some bespoke VST's.
There's a learning curve for sure, but it's not too bad once you learn the basics of how audio and MIDI are handled + general JUCE application structure.
Two tips:
Don't bother with the Projucer, use the CMAke example to get going. Especially if you don't use XCode or Visual Studio.
If your on a Mac, you might need to self-sign the VST. I don't remember the exact process, but it's something I had to do once I got an M4 Mac.
I haven't really found anything yet that Gemini can't do in python for this.
LLMs have absolutely killed any interest I use to have in the max/pd/reaktor wiring up boxes UI.
I have really gone further though and thought why do I even care about VST or a DAW or anything like this? Why not break completely free of everything?
I take inspiration from Trevor Wishart and the Composers Desktop Project for this. Wishart's music could only really be made with his own tools.
It is easy to sound original when using a tool no one else has.
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AudioKit for iOS/Mac is also interesting and easy to work with.
For a great example of some (non-live) coded music, I would recommend The Haywire Frontier by Nathan Ho [0]. The whole album was sequenced and synthesized entirely in SuperCollider with no samples, external hardware, or third-party plugins. It's really interesting and a crazy achievement, definitely worth a listen.
For live coding, Switch Angel is definitely someone I would actually go to see live, check out this video of hers [1].
[0] https://nathanho.bandcamp.com/album/haywire-frontier [1] https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M
This Nathan Ho album is a good example. Thanks for sharing.
> I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).
Aside from the novelty factor (due to very different UI/UX) and the idea that you can use generative code to make music (which became an even more interesting factor in the age of LLMs), I agree.
And even the generative code part I mentioned is a novelty factor as well, and isn't really practical for someone who actually makes music as their end-goal (and not someone who is just experimenting around with tech or how far one can get with music-as-code UIUX).
Give it some time.
I feel like the newer (ish) tools such as Strudel, and also this here Loopmaster, have a much better toolset for producing stuff that actually sounds great (vs just purely the novelty of "look im coding beats"). Like, Strudel comes with an extensive sample bank of actually quality samples (vs relying on synthesis out of some sense of purity), and also comes with lots of very decent sounding effects and filters and the likes.
Combine that with the ability to do generative stuff in a way that Ableton, FL Studio or Renoise are never going to get you, I won't be surprised if people invent some cool new genres with these tools eventually.
Basically, your comment reads a bit like saying demoscene makes no sense because you can make any video better with Blender and DaVinci Resolve. And this obviously isn't true given the sheer overload of spectacularly great demos out there whose unique esthetic was easy to obtain because they're code, not video. (find "cdak" by Quite for an on-the-nose example).
I'm going to be surprised if this new wave of music coding tools will not result in some madly weird new electronic music genres.
Obviously there's plenty of stuff these tools are terrible for (like your example of nuanced instrument parts), but don't dismiss the kinds of things they're going to turn out to be amazing at.
What I like in comparison to sample-based software like Tidal and Strudel is exactly the ability to create very novel and interesting sounds using synthesis, something which I prefer. Genres like Techno rely a lot on timbre novelty.
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Renoise just added support for a programmatic sequence generator called pattrns.
https://github.com/renoise/pattrns
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100% agree.
I think this format of composition is going to encourage a highly repetitive structure to your music. Good programming languages constrain and prevent the construction of bad programs. Applying that to music is effectively going to give you quantization of every dimension of composition.
I'm sure its possible to break out of that but you are fighting an uphill battle.
Quite the opposite actually. certain live coding languages give you the tools to create extremely complex patterns in a very controlled manner, in ways you simply wouldn't be able to do via any other method. the most popular artist exploring these ideas is Kindohm, who is sort of an ambassador figure for the TidalCycles language. Having used TidalCycles myself, the language lends itself particularly well to this kind of stuff as opposed to more traditional song/track structures. And yet it also constrains and prevents the construction of bad programs in a very strict manner via its type system and compiler.
It's also notable for being probably the only Haskell library used almost exclusively by people with no prior knowledge of Haskell, which is an insane feat in itself.
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The ease of quantization in the DAW is pretty easy to do as well. So I am not sure that would be unique to music / live coding sessions.
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Some of us enjoy highly repetitive music, at least some of the time.
"Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." -- Marcus Brigstocke (probably?)
Also, related but not - YouTube's algorithm gave me this the other day - showing how to reconstruct the beat of Blue Monday by New Order:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZCv0_rBO4
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I've suspected that, too, while looking at DAWs and how people make music with them. It seems a bit boring to me.
To kinda get away from that or even just experiment, I was interested in the possibility of writing music with code and either inject randomness in places or at least vary the intervals between beats/etc using some other functions (which would again just be layering in patterns, but in a more subtle way).
Procedural generation can be useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. Imagine using cellular automata or physics simulations to trigger notes, key changes, etc. Turing completeness means there are no limits on what you can generate. Some DAWs and VSTs give you a Turing complete environment, e.g. Bitwig's grid or Max/MSP. But for someone with a programming background those kinds of visual editors are less intuitive and less productive than writing code.
Of course, often creativity comes from limitations. I would agree that it's usually not desirable to go full procedural generation, especially when you want to wrangle something into the structure of a song. I think the best approach is a hybrid one, where procedural generation is used to generate certain ideas and sounds, and then those are brought into a more traditional DAW-like environment.
I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.
Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.
These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.
A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.
I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.
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As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.
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To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.
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I see it as a neat way for nerds to nerd out about nerd stuff in an experiential way. Like, this is not going to headline a big time rave or festival or anything, but in a community of people who like math or programming or science, sure, why not introduce this kind of performance as another little celebration of their hobby?
Years ago I went to a sci-fi convention for the first time, because I had moved to a new town and didn't know anyone, and I like sci-fi. I realized when I was there that despite me growing up reading Hugo and Nebula award winners, despite watching pretty much every sci-fi show on TV, despite being a full-time computer nerd, the folks who go to sci-fi conventions are a whole nother subculture again. They have their own heroes, their own in-jokes, their own jargon... and even their own form of music! It's made by people in the community for the community and it misses the point to judge it by "objective" standards from the outside, because it's not about trying to make "interesting music" or write the best song of all time. The music made in that context is not being made as an end in itself, or even as the focus of the event, it's just a mechanism to enable a quirky subculture to hang out and bond in a way that's fun for them. I see this kind of live coded music as fulfilling a similar role in a different subculture. Maybe it's not for you, but that's fine.
Fair point, and that's the challenge in both the software's abilities and the creator's skills.
If you see it as yet another instrument you have to master, then you can go pretty far. I'm finding myself exploring rhythms and sounds in ways I could never do in a DAW so fast, but at the same time I do find limiting a lot of factors, especially sequencing.
So far I haven't gotten beyond a good sounding loop, hence the name "loopmaster", and maybe that's the limit, which is why I made a 2 deck "dual" mode in the editor, so that it can be played as a DJ set where you don't really need that much progression.
That said, it's quite fun to play with it and experiment with sounds, and whenever you make something you enjoy, you can export a certain length and use it as a track in your mix.
My goal is certainly to be able to create full length tracks with nuances and variations as you say, just not entirely sure how to integrate this into the format right now.
Feedback[0] is appreciated!
[0]: https://loopmaster.featurebase.app/
My wife's (and many other music-lovers') test for whether something counts as "real music" is whether they can perform it live (and sound as good as the recording). Music which is programmed doesn't count, as there's a lot of nuance that a skilled musician with an actual instrument can put into a performance in a split-second as they play.
If it moves and connects with you then it's real music.
It's fine to have a preference for live musicianship, but the 'real music' argument has been leveled against every new musical technology (remember the furore around Dylan going electric?). It dismisses contemporary creativity based on a traditionalist bias that elevates one form of execution above all others. There's also a huge amount of skill in producing good electronic music. It's always hard to make good music no matter the means.
It's a spectrum and people are free to draw the line wherever they want.
If you dial the dial high enough you can say that that amplifiers aren't "real music" because you are no longer hearing the "real instruments", but "a machine that is distorting the sound". If that's your line, then only listening to classical music at a concert hall would count as "real music".
You could dial it up even higher. Using a musical instrument at all is not "real music" any more, because human voice can have more nuance than any instrument. Then going to a church to listen to gregorian chants would be the only "real music".
I personally think that Daft Punk rocks, and for a lot of artists I very much prefer listening to their studio recording rather than listening to them in a concert. (Surrounded by ... people. Ugh.)
The nuance of a skilled player in the moment is a beautiful thing to behold, but saying programmed music isn't "real music" is like saying that film acting isn't real acting, but theater acting is.
It's like saying a novel isn't real speaking, but a speech is.
Like animating an image isn't real, but recording a video is.
If that's your preference, then that's alright. But it's a silly distinction to make.
here's a whole opera from a Star Trek episode I coded in Supercollider - can indeed code things other than EDM... (its a screen grab - being synthesized in real time)
https://vimeo.com/944533415?fl=ip&fe=ec
the great advantage over DAWs etc is that you can name things and slowly build your own bespoke tools... for this work all timing was done in reference to the words rather than beats and bars - I can re-flow the whole piece by tapping through the syllables on my space-key. Something that would be totally impossible in a traditional platform!
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Sign up please and teach us.
I've seen a couple of TikToks with someone doing live coding with this same tool and it was really cool to watch because they really knew it well, but like you said it was bog-standard house/techno.
I find trackers to be in the same category you put live coding into, probably DAWs as well, but many people do some amazing things with all three. In the more academic computer music world there is a fair amount of diversity in live coding where it is generally combined with algorithmic/generative techniques to rapidly create complexity and nuance. SuperCollider seems to have the most interesting output here, for me at least; I have seen little that really grabs me but they do show the capabilities of the process and I find that quite interesting. Improvisation and jamming is just not my thing, so live coding falls a bit short for me.
It's not gonna add anything to your repertoire. It will appear so after some time but it's really just an approach for people who have bad hand-eye coordination and ability to hold a rhythm or a hard time acquiring these skills, or tinkering with DAWs, which have a weirdly annoying first hour use time/learning curve
What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 [2] Nice example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg
Often an article posted to hn will cause a mini-trend as users who are engaging with the subject discover and share more related resources.
Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.
classic overnight success 20 years in the making. many such cases.
I must say the narrated trance piece by switch angel blew me socks right off, to me feels like this should be a genre in itself.
And simpler generative music significantly predates computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel
Live coding music/visuals/art has been a fairly major subculture for over 15 years: https://blog.toplap.org/ Prior to that there was plenty of live/interactive code-based music going on within the computer music scene, HMSL (FORTH based)[1] and CLM (Lisp based)[2] come to mind.
Real-time sound synthesis was tough to live-code, or to run in real-time at all, prior to the faster personal computers of the early 90s. (The tracker scene obviously pre-dates this, but in that case the actual sound synthesis algorithms weren't live coded.) In fact, code-to-music dates back to 1951[3], or 1957[4], depending on your definitions. There is a large history of development by many computer musicians following on from Max Matthews' MUSIC-N. The Computer Music Tutorial[5] is a good source for the academic/research institutions/serious composers part of the picture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_Music_Specificati...
[2] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/clm/
[3] https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/history/csirac/music
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N
[5] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tu...
CSOUND is the oldest code-2-music framework I know of, and that's been here since the 80's, so the concept is not new
The tools/frameworks have become more plentiful, approachable, and mature over the past 10-15 years, to the point where you can just go to strudel.cc and start coding music right from your browser.
I think the creator of the video you've linked has had a couple videos go viral, which may be part of it
My guess is we are either at the top or rising to the top of cyclical curve of the trend.
The language certainly looks nice! Is it open source? I think it makes sense for this kind of tool, since it's inherently "hackery". I mean people who want to write music with code also probably want the ability to understand and modify any part of the stack, it's the nature of the audience.
I'll shamelessly plug my weirdo version in a Forth variant, also a house loop running in the browser: https://audiomasher.org/patch/WRZXQH
Well, maybe it's closer to trance than house. It's also considerably more esoteric and less commented! Win-win?
Thanks! I tried to make it as familiar as possible, inspired by JS. It's not yet open-source, mainly because the source is a bit of a mess, but it will be once I tidy things up. Follow me on GitHub[0] for updates. Also that sounds to me like Tech-House/Electro-House :D Very nice!
[0]: https://github.com/stagas
If you like this then check out Oxygene pt4 in JS[0].
[0] https://dittytoy.net/ditty/59b8a8d54d
Nice, that's the optimized version - sounds actually a little different than the original one it's derived from. (actually better which I didn't expect) Original: https://dittytoy.net/ditty/24373308b4
I like how music recognition flags it as the original Jarre piece.
I first did stuff like this when I was a teen using a 6502 machine and a synth card - using white noise to make tshhh snares etc. All coded in 6502. The bible was Hal Chamberlin's Musical Application of Microprocessors.
Then of course we had games abusing the SID etc to make fantastic tunes and then came very procedural music in size coded PC and Amiga demo coding that underneath the hood were doing tiny synth work and sequencing very much like dittytoy etc.
Shadertoy even has procedural audio but it doesn't get used enough.
Fantastic to experience all of this!
If you like old computers and are interested in live coding music then I highly recommend to check out this video (Making 8-bit Music From Scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC Prompt):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5BhGOt2vE
SO fun!!!
fun experiment to get you tinkerers started, skip to the bottom play The Complete Loop - https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/how-to-synthesize-a-house-l...
Then, on line 21, with `pat('[~ e3a3c4]*4',(trig,velocity,pitches)->`.
Change *4 to *2 and back to *4, to reduce the interval that the "Chords" play. If you do it real fast with your backspace + 2 or backspace + 4 key, you can change the chords in realtime, and kinda vibe with the beat a little bit.
Definitely recommend wearing headphones to hear the entire audio spectrum (aka bass).*
So many tweaks but here is another:
change line 12 from 8000 to 800
you can also highlight one or multiple lines and press (cmd + /) to toggle if it is commented out or not to turn off a layer!
I really want something like this as a VST plugin.
I don't imagine making a full song out of this, but it would be a great instrument to have.
I'm considering a VST version but for now there is an Export Audio feature you can use to get a perfect audio loop to use with Ableton (or any other DAW) with oversampling up to 8x for great quality.
How much do you need in donations to make it happen.
I'll put 50$ down right now.
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Shoutout to PACE who banned scripting in the JUCE 8 license terms so if you wanted to make this using the leading framework, you can't.
Do you have a source for this? I don't see any indication from a quick Google other than this thread as the second result.
The license at: https://github.com/juce-framework/JUCE/blob/master/LICENSE.m...
indicates you can just license any module under agpl and avoid the JUCE 8 license (which to be fair, I'm not bothering to read)
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Define scripting.
I'm not going to test it, but couldn't you just load a json file with all params.
Various instructions, etc.
I can't believe it's not code!
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I route midi generated by strudel.cc in to my DAW.
If you're interested in this you may also be interested in ChucK [1] - a strongly-timed music programming language.
[1]: https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
And SuperCollider, Faust, Extempore:
https://supercollider.github.io/
https://faust.grame.fr/
https://github.com/digego/extempore
And numerous others
Very cool. https://loopmaster.xyz/generate is super fun also.
Thanks! For anyone trying this, it's being HN crushed right now and hitting rate-limits, you should try again in a bit if you see an error.
Also, there is an AI DJ mode[0] where you set the mood/genre and the AI generates and plays music for you infinitely.
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/editor?aidj
I was surprised at the audible difference it made to reset the RNG seed for the hi-hat noise function every time it triggered. I’m curious what the justification for doing this is—does the randomness arise from the geometry of the hi-hat itself and not the way you hit it? Is the idea to imitate the sound of sample-based percussion?
My understanding is that because it's a very small sample, it's basically a combination of a subset of sine waves, and because we're very sensitive to the nuances of high-pitched sounds, even small changes in that space make a lot of difference. Every RNG seed produces a different sounding hihat, and if you don't reset it, it continues producing different hihats, which is unnatural. Another explanation is also to resemble sample-based audio, but perhaps it's all of these things combined.
Is there a way to sidechain the bass to a compressor with the kick as an input? otherwise the low end is very muddy.
Yes, there is a `sidechain` function designed specifically for this. I wanted to keep this tutorial simple so I skipped a lot of mixing techniques or were left as an exercise to the reader, but I will try to cover those as well in future tutorials. Sign up to get notified for when they arrive!
For now you can see how it's done here[0] on line 139. I pretty much use it on every other track I've made as well.
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/loop/6221a807-9658-4ea0-bfec-8925ccf8...
I'm sold. This is really cool. Looking forward to this becoming more open; shared with my edmproduction fam. Thanks!
> and includes a limiter to prevent clipping
It's still clipping terribly in my browser
If it was clipping it would show as red in the amplitude visualizer, however the bass does have a lot of energy and that might be the cause for the clipping you're hearing. You can multiply it by a factor to reduce its amplitude.
It strikes me as kind of weird (or maybe a red flag?) that there's no landing page nor an About page.
I think it's more of a red flag that they chose a name that's one letter away from a well-known site that sells music samples: https://www.loopmasters.com/
Not like a fringe unknown one, but one with over 20 years of history and now-owned by Beatport.
meh, if they were that worried about their brand, they should have bought up the variants of their domain plus TLDs. otherwise, they can't possibly be that concerned about their trademark.
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