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jyrkesh 6 hours ago [-]
First few lines of the tutorial linked above the fold:
> Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more.
> But wait, how rude of me! Let me introduce myself - I’m Sam Aaron - the chap that created Sonic Pi. You can find me at @samaaron on Twitter and I’d be more than happy to say hello to you. You might also be interested in finding out more about my Live Coding Performances where I code with Sonic Pi live in front of audiences.
> If you have any thoughts, or ideas for improving Sonic Pi - please pass them on - feedback is so helpful. You never know, your idea might be the next big feature!
In an older age, I might have thought this overly flowery or indulgent, but it's SO refreshing to see technical prose that's so clearly written by a real human with an individualized voice, tone, writing style, etc. I'm by no means anti-LLM, but I'm becoming incredibly fatigued at seeing the same style of marketing speak as the intro text to nearly all the new software I come across. Kudos to being a human and injecting your voice into an increasingly impersonal space.
The rest of the tutorial that I read below that doesn't disappoint, I intend to run through it despite my not so Copious Spare Time. I've really been looking to get into programmed music and this seems as good as a time and tool as any.
Cheers!
saghm 6 hours ago [-]
I can't say I agree with this is take; it's never occurred to me "how rude of this author of the tutorial not to plug their Twitter handle before teaching me the thing I came for". I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly.
onion2k 4 hours ago [-]
I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly.
Love Sonic Pi. I can't make music but watching someone who can is fantastic. We had Sam (the creator of Sonic Pi) on stage at Goatmire Elixir and it was glorious. This year he comes back with a free 4 hour workshop, a talk and a DJ set at the end. It is going to be a blast.
Can't wait to hear his stuff in a venue where people are actually primed to move. Something very satisfying about code turning into music live.
I'm now working on a new audio DSP engine building on this learning which combines my favourite aspects of scsynth and Erlang which I'll be discussing and revealing over on my Patreon over the coming months (https://patreon.com/samaaron)
dirkk0 17 minutes ago [-]
Got it, great to hear that! On your Patreon now, and I sponsored via GitHub.
samaaron 11 minutes ago [-]
Oh amazing - thank-you so much for your kind and generous support! I can only do this work because of people such as yourself. Thanks!
guytv 1 hours ago [-]
Did anyone have claude read the syntax, and start generating music from english prompts, yet?
Please post results!
55 minutes ago [-]
Tbarlow 3 hours ago [-]
Sonic Pi is fantastic for live coding sessions. Used it once for a small demo, really intuitive and fun to noodle with.
markkitti 9 hours ago [-]
If you are interested in a live demo / performance, see minute 7:13 from JuliaCon 2024 / PyData Eindhoven 2024:
Saw him way over 10 years ago presenting it a Rubycon, it was incredible to watch and even thought I do understand a bit about music it's really hard for me to transport this concept to code event thought ruby is my language of choice. Tried it a few times since.
Maybe I should try again with some LLM help
127 3 hours ago [-]
Is there alternative syntax? I don't want to be typing "end" everywhere. Stack based, declarative, sexp, indentation, anything?
Right now it is based on mix of Three.js (for visuals) and Tone.js (for audio). I playing with the idea to rewrite the synth/sequencing part on WASM. But the live music scripting language will remain to be ClojureScript. As I see the Lisp language family to be much superior in expressiveness. Less syntax rules, more code as data
donaldihunter 2 hours ago [-]
There are alternative frameworks that also drive supercollider:
Overtone [0] is a precursor to Sonic Pi that uses Clojure. Sam used to work on it before he created Sonic Pi. I remember having great fun playing with it at a Clojure meetup in about 2011. Overtone appears to still be going if you want to check it out.
I used to have this issue as the package in AUR had some issues but they should be resolved now?
y1n0 7 hours ago [-]
Sonic Pi was done in clojure once upon a time. Looks like ruby now?
chris_j 3 hours ago [-]
Sam previously worked on Overtone, which is a Clojure library for driving the Supercollider synthesiser. I understand that he decided to create Sonic Pi in Ruby in order to make it more accessible to beginners. (And Ruby was all the rage back then.)
I recall at some point the author started working on yet another version which used its own language instead of a ruby DSL but I don't know what happened with that
I'm now working on a new audio DSP engine which builds on all this learning which combines my favourite parts of scsynth and Erlang. I'll be discussing and sharing progress over on my Patreon (https://patreon.com/samaaron).
As a sneak peek - here's an experimental prototype of the kind of direction I'm headed in: https://sonic-pi.net/tau
suprjami 8 hours ago [-]
So this is like OpenSCAD (code-based 3D modelling) but for music?
> Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more.
> But wait, how rude of me! Let me introduce myself - I’m Sam Aaron - the chap that created Sonic Pi. You can find me at @samaaron on Twitter and I’d be more than happy to say hello to you. You might also be interested in finding out more about my Live Coding Performances where I code with Sonic Pi live in front of audiences.
> If you have any thoughts, or ideas for improving Sonic Pi - please pass them on - feedback is so helpful. You never know, your idea might be the next big feature!
In an older age, I might have thought this overly flowery or indulgent, but it's SO refreshing to see technical prose that's so clearly written by a real human with an individualized voice, tone, writing style, etc. I'm by no means anti-LLM, but I'm becoming incredibly fatigued at seeing the same style of marketing speak as the intro text to nearly all the new software I come across. Kudos to being a human and injecting your voice into an increasingly impersonal space.
The rest of the tutorial that I read below that doesn't disappoint, I intend to run through it despite my not so Copious Spare Time. I've really been looking to get into programmed music and this seems as good as a time and tool as any.
Cheers!
The text has been there since 2018. BERT wouldn't have been able to write like that. https://web.archive.org/web/20180312062205/http://sonic-pi.n...
Short example (I don't know if she's using pi/strudel/whatever here but you get the idea):
https://youtube.com/shorts/pKs7NehiszY
Can't wait to hear his stuff in a venue where people are actually primed to move. Something very satisfying about code turning into music live.
And thanks for your work!!
I ported SuperCollider's scsynth to Web Audio workouts (https://sonic-pi.net/supersonic/demo.html) late 2025, built an experimental spike called Sonic Tau (https://sonic-pi.net/tau). Then I wrapped SuperSonic in a native audio framework and used it to replace scsynth in Sonic Pi v5 (https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/releases/tag/v5.0.0)
I'm now working on a new audio DSP engine building on this learning which combines my favourite aspects of scsynth and Erlang which I'll be discussing and revealing over on my Patreon over the coming months (https://patreon.com/samaaron)
https://youtu.be/g1Jsk3p_9O0?t=433&is=fXBtVdS6R178V7Lm
Maybe I should try again with some LLM help
Live: https://tmythicator.github.io/tritoncha/
Right now it is based on mix of Three.js (for visuals) and Tone.js (for audio). I playing with the idea to rewrite the synth/sequencing part on WASM. But the live music scripting language will remain to be ClojureScript. As I see the Lisp language family to be much superior in expressiveness. Less syntax rules, more code as data
https://tidalcycles.org is built in Haskell
https://strudel.cc is a Javascript REPL
[0] https://github.com/overtone/overtone
https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.sonic_pi.SonicPi
I haven't used Overtone in many years but it looks like it's still going: https://github.com/overtone/overtone
I recall at some point the author started working on yet another version which used its own language instead of a ruby DSL but I don't know what happened with that
https://www.patreon.com/samaaron/posts/announcing-sonic-1126...
I'm now working on a new audio DSP engine which builds on all this learning which combines my favourite parts of scsynth and Erlang. I'll be discussing and sharing progress over on my Patreon (https://patreon.com/samaaron).
As a sneak peek - here's an experimental prototype of the kind of direction I'm headed in: https://sonic-pi.net/tau
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478