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.

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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

Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

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Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/