GitHub GitHub Universe 2020: Play - Creative Coding, 11 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: Express yourself with code: Learn to live code beats and riffs with Sonic Pi - GitHub Universe 2020

Description

#algorave #sonicpi

Presented by Sam Aaron, Live Coder & Creator, Sonic Pi

Sonic Pi is a free, code-based music creation and performance tool for both students and professional musicians. It is possible for beginners to code fresh beats, driving bass lines and shimmering synth riffs—all while learning core computer science concepts, such as sequencing, functions, variables, loops, data structures, and algorithms. In this workshop, you'll learn how to use Sonic Pi to live code beats and riffs. You don't need to know how to either code or make music to get started, but by the end of this workshop you'll know enough about both to start your live coding journey.

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A

Hi, I'm sam aaron and I'm here to talk to you about how you might be able to use your coding skills or learn some coding skills to become expressive. What on earth do I mean by that? Well, I mean well typically, you learn to program to build business apps or web apps or as a career, which is a great thing to do, and many of you out.

A

There may be already doing that and that's brilliant, but there are many, many others who yet to really touch code, to become familiar with it to understand what it is and for them, particularly. I think we need to find ways to reach out to help them to understand what code is and what it can do, and I think building business apps is one thing, but I think that being expressive with it using it to share your feelings and thoughts in new ways.

A

I think actually is a really powerful and wonderful and yet to be really fully explored aspect of programming and that's really what I've spent most of my life, exploring myself and all the tools I've built all the things I've learned. I've tried my best to compact, together to squish into little small thing that I can give to you to play with and that the latest version of that is the tool called sonic pi, and this is an open source, fully free tool that lets you write text.

A

In the same way, you might write it write in a word document, but it has a special button which you can press, which then turns that text that code into music we're going to see how that can help you get started to program, but also, if you're, a professional programmer. This is still a really interesting tool for you, because it has concurrency has event data stores.

A

It can do distributed programming, it's deterministic, it's got all sorts of cool fancy features that let you really do some really explorational advanced things with your skills and that's actually really what this is all about. It's about creating an equivalent of a guitar, and why would I talk about guitars well think about guitars, like it's an object, you can pick up that most people can pick up and most people can play and strum hit all the strings.

A

So starting the guitar is actually quite a simple and easy thing to do, but the reason why most people pick up a guitar probably isn't because it's a beautiful object made of wood and looks lovely and shiny and polished in the shop.

A

It's probably because they've seen their favorite artist, jimi, hendrix or taylor swift, perform and they've seen this weird wooden medallion around their neck and they've said what on earth is that wooden thing around their neck? I need one of those and their friends have said: that's a guitar, and so that's why often they've picked up guitars, because they've seen motivational aspirational figures using that instrument to do amazing things.

A

So I think that when we're thinking about creating experiences with code, we need to think about both of those things simultaneously.

A

Firstly, making sure it's super simple to get started and we'll we'll see, hopefully how that's the case with sonic pie and then, secondly, to make sure that, if you practice and put in the effort and learn and study and work hard, then you can be rewarded with being able to do things that you could only dream about before.

A

And I think that's true of the guitar and it's also true with sonic pi and I'll, be showing you a little bit of that today in this workshop.

A

But really this workshop is about getting started, but at the end of the convertible towards the end of the conference are going to deliver a performance and that performance is going to be my demonstration to you of what what you could do if you practiced now that performance is going to be pretty special, it's going to be the first time I'm ever going to live code, a performance that also includes your work.

A

So we're going to see the end of this workshop, a call to a challenge to call to you to produce your own small little riff uh audio riff.

A

When I'll show you how to do that, that you can then use to uh uh to obviously play yourself, but then you can send it to me, and there's gonna be a link below uh in in this description of this video of where to send that little snippet of text to be like eight lines of code, just nothing, nothing complicated, then I'll be able to collate and bring those together and and depending on I mean if I get a million of them, I'm not going to use all of them, but I'm going to use as many as I can and integrate them with my performance and show your names and and to work with your code as much as working with my own code to make it more of a collaborative performance.

A

So that's going to be quite exciting. So today we're going to get to understand the beginning and how we can get started and then the performance is going to really show you. Hopefully what you could achieve and give you hopefully that that that motivation to really to learn this thing and to become the dj of the future. Really, yes, that's how I'm going to describe it. I mean I mean like the dj of the future right.

A

um So here I am in performance mode and I've got my code on the screen and I've got my crazy, visuals and stuff. So you can do this kind of thing, but what you're really seeing is this code here, and this is the sonic pi editor and this text head environment is just a text over environment. I can type words and those words have to mean something to the environment, so this this crazy load of letters does obviously means nothing.

A

So if I try and run that program that doesn't work, so we obviously need to know the very basics of this system, and so the basic program you can write is the word play and choose a number like 70 and then hit the run button and it creates a beep. So this is a complete, fully functioning syntactically, valid semantically, correct program, and this is a kind of program that many children all over the world have used. Sonic pi to learn to start programming have all written, and this is lovely.

A

I mean it's a great way of just getting started where you have a very simple thing to write and you have immediate feedback you're having you're, not looking through tools of logs or where things are you're just hearing a beep and you have control of that I mean you can play some options. I can play that be louder or quieter.

A

A

How high or how low that beep is, and so I have the ability now to manipulate the pitch, the the how high or how low that note is by changing this number um for those who are interested there's the units of this is what we call midi notes. They kind of map on to notes in a piano, so each whole integer that goes up. Is the next note, including the black notes on the piano or if you go on the fretboard of guitar, it's one rung up the fretboard, so we can. We can see that.

A

You can hear that, but this is uh interestingly this.

A

This exact note, you're hearing now is, is determined and defined by western standards, so we're hearing what western orchestras might play for note, 55 and that just happens to be a decision that has been agreed upon and it only really holds in the western traditions of music. And if we uh break out of those, we really start to explore all sorts of interesting ways of choosing how high or how low your note is, and so sonic pi. Although it makes the western tradition easy by using integers, it does give you access to.

A

To playing whole fraction for a whole fraction, fractions of notes, so you have essentially floating point access to the the range of notes you can have. So you can. You can play essentially any note you can perceive you can play with the system by just choosing the right number and you don't have to stick to whole numbers. You can stick to floating points if you want to break out of the western traditions, which I think is pretty exciting.

A

So far, though I've just shown you one line of code. What about two lines of code? Let's play now it's 70 and then play it out 75.

A

now the way to learn sonic pi uh is to write the code, not press the run button. Just imagine what it sounds like. So I invite you at home to look at that code and to imagine what it might sound like note, 70 and then note 75.

A

Oh, they played at the same time now you might have expected it to play in note, 70 and then note 75 and actually in the early days of sonic pi. When I first created it, that's exactly what it did, but it did it so fast after one one after another, you couldn't hear it just was the computer is, is crazy, fast and interpreting the instructions, but actually in their more recent versions.

A

This is actually played sample accurately at the same time, so really really precisely at the same time, because timing and music are something which really work and are important and then necessary for each other, and so sonic pie has extremely good timing. Semantics, that's really one of its core skills.

A

So if you want to make a melody, we break it out by adding a sleep command, and that then allows us to tell the computer to go to sleep between note, 70 and note 75, and this way we can now make our melody of whichever notes we want. Let's go for 82.

A

Lovely now this might be fun, uh it is fun. I think it is anyway and uh but it might be fun to you, but what I think is really interesting is this is likely to be fun to many more people in your lives than talking about.

A

I don't know nginx configuration or enterprise java service beans, they sort of thing. No, probably not. um uh What else might you talk about um javascript promises? I don't know whatever the latest technology lace. Whiz-Bang thing is, the chances are most the people in your lives who aren't programmers are going to struggle to follow along and be interested, whereas if you talk about music, actually, I found it's much more easy to have that conversation and to keep them engaged.

A

So I think this is more likely to interest a broader audience, and I think this is the goal of sonic pie. So sonic pie is meant to be two things. It was meant to be a musical instrument. I was talking about guitars talking about the fact you can get started and how easy it is to get started with the guitar piano here. Hopefully, you can see that this is also easy to get started with.

A

We have access to pretty much any melody, you've ever heard or will hear with two commands which note to play and when to wait. How long to wait for the next note, but this is a crucial thing. This also gives you access to doing really sophisticated and really interesting detailed music.

A

So we can take any of the synthesizers here and bring them all in and mix them together and all sorts of events and sounds and have a lot of fun, and we can have access to all of that here as well and all you need to do, for that is to start adding more code, essentially to ask to explain the different kinds of things you might want to do. So what do I mean by that? Let's play those 70.

A

a bit more code. Is the release commands? Oh look at that correct! That's how long the note lasts. For so I can attack that faded in. I can fade it in and have no release suddenly cut off or I could change the synthesizer. Let's change it to profit.

A

Actually works much better at.

A

Maybe some of you might want to know why I'm doing this subtraction here? Actually, you can obviously just do put throw some maths in there. But 12s in western music is an octave so uh 3 times 12 is 36.. That's going down. Three octaves just saves me having to do that mental arithmetic in my head, um so we have now ability to play these notes. Let's go for release eight.

A

Make it louder.

A

Make me cut off.

A

A

So here I'm able to mix kind of like drone music, essentially by layering the sounds on top of each other, um probably for this kind of environment. You want to be in sort of dark mode, uh so that you're in some sort of like a night, clubbing environment and you're playing these sounds. So what we've got here essentially is multi-threaded environment. So, each time the code goes pink, it creates a new thread of execution and gives that thread the code that you can see on the screen to execute.

A

It runs through that code from the top to the bottom and when it finishes it automatically stops that thread garbage collected tidies all the things all the resources that's been allocated and then freeze it. So you can have another thread. Of course, that means you can have the multiple of these threads running at the same time, which is why you're hearing the sounds layering on top of each other, which gives you really a lot of interesting potential for for drone music.

A

um But it also has a really uh other important aspect as well, because uh in solid pi we've seen it already that we can do play, we can play multiple nodes.

A

We can wait between the nodes. We can change the length of nodes.

A

We can change a synthesizer yep, and so this is gives you access to a huge amount of music possibilities. Already you can essentially compose your own piece of music. You can change the sound as it's being played. You can change the length of the sound. You can change the qualities of the sound with this cut off and other things, and each of these synthesizers has documentation describing all the different things it can do and all the options it supports in the documentation system.

A

Already there you have a lot of fun and power there, but one more was two more really actually quite exciting things to show you that really can get. You started and advance pretty quickly. The second one is well. Obviously, you can use control structures, that's not even a thing to explain. um Look at this eight times, I'm going to play that note. Wait for a small amount of second here's, an eighth of a second.

A

So let's play it 75 or I can do a scale for double e3 minor pentatonic. I can choose a random note: it's pretty cool, so this is actually this code. Here is pretty much the start of the challenge which we'll get on to in 10 minutes or so, but so just to get you get in your head. This is the kind of code I'm going to hopefully ask you to write, but listen to this, but first of all notice that it plays the same thing every time.

A

So what we're hearing, even though we've got this word choose which you think might be to do randomization, maybe I've got like a bag of letters, I'm playing scrabble and I'm pulling out random letters.

A

If I pull out eight letters and then put them back in again and pull out a different eight, I'm going to get a different, eight letters, but yet with sonic pi I always get the same ones and that's because by design sonic pi is what we call deterministic, which means that it always does the same things every time it runs and that might sound limiting like oh, but I want my randomization to always be random. That's surely that's the point of randomization.

A

Well, actually, you want probably two things you want it to feel random so that you can try new things out uh and we can get that feeling by changing what we call the random seed. So by default, the random scene is zero.

A

What we heard before it's the same, but actually by putting some random number in here, we get it to make different choices, or this number or this number.

A

Now, if we like that, we now have the ability to reproduce it. So the cool thing now is, if you were to take this code and copy and paste it or just type it out again into your version of sonic pi that you've downloaded from the website.

A

You will hear exactly the same notes played in exactly the same way. So that's the second benefit of a deterministic system. Is it allows us to share the code and to know what the people who play that code are going to hear that that turns out to be really useful for collaborative jamming and for composing, together with friends in a distributed fashion, which means that code that you upload to github and to just say you paste copy and paste in sonic pi?

A

You know you're gonna hear what the person who created that intended due to here. That's that's a critical thing, but then another thing to show you is the effects. I can use an effects block. Well, what do I mean by that? Well here we have. This do end, which describes the iteration how, where to start the iteration? Let's do so I'm going to do something eight times. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do everything between the do and the end, which means all this code.

A

Any code that was written between these two words do an end will be repeated eight times um we could have another do end block around that. You can see it's nesting it and we're going to do something else. With that code we can use uh with effect, let's choose reverb. Let's make sure it sounds like it's a big room.

A

That's nice, isn't it or I could choose.

A

Echo going to choose, crush or a bit crusher, there's a whole ton of these effects that I can play with flanger.

A

Which can change quadrant sound, so these are like kind of like guitar effects, pedals that you might buy from a shop that about. I know a hundred dollars each you you, you buy five of them chain them together and then you plug your guitar ends and you can twiddle the controls and you can change the sounds well in the same way with that you can nest these effects inside sonic prize, so I can play it through brush and then through flanger, and then I can play that through reverb.

A

And we could nest these things together, so this play sound goes through. The crush goes to the flanger, goes through the reverb, and then you hear it um and then so we're able to to combine all these effects together. So this is a really cool technique for being able to change the quality of the sounds in the same way, a guitarist can change the quality of their guitar by using these effects pedals.

A

So now we've learned how to play notes. We learn how to play any note you can hear by using floating points. We can wait between notes. We can make any melody. We can change the sound of the sound by changing the synthesizer and also we can change from the options of the synthesizer, which are basically like these kind of knobs on this synthesizer here, but they're just words. Key value pairs, an associated map, as it were, of control values which are passed to as a parameter, an optional parameter to the function play.

A

We can then use things like control structures like iteration to do something eight times or seven times or 800 times how many times you want to do it repeating this around here and then we're using lexical closures or so-called effects blocks to then wrap around your or sound code to change the sound.

A

So this means that there's play of of the chip lead sounds which is playing here, is gonna, be crushed flanged and reverbed, so you're gonna get this new kind of sound and obviously changing the order of those will change the sound and removing them and adding them or changing it around.

A

So that's a lot of fun, and this is essentially what I'm hoping you might come up with with the challenge which we'll talk about in a moment, but before that I'd like to show you one more thing which I think is really quite fun and that is being able to live code. So everything we've talked about so far is sort of a compositional mode. Where we're writing a bunch of codes. Changing the sounds. Changing the timing, pressing run hearing the sounds. um What actually is also fun to do is to make a loop.

A

So let's play a sample, so we can also play pre-recorded sounds so, let's play this loop r man break play it quite loud.

A

We can beat stretch that to match 2b.

A

We can create our loop. You can see for two beats. So now we have.

A

An endlessly repeating drum break, which is pretty cool, so let's just part that for one second- and let's do it again, but with a different sample, uh let's play the bass, drum power sample and let's see for half of it cool now I'm I was amazed actually by the number of times I've seen people write this code, so, let's actually, let's for effect.

A

Let's do this so now we have this code here again, as we saw before the way to learn. Sonic pi is to read the code. Imagine what it sounds like in your head and then press the run button. So just spend a moment. You heard the kick drum. You heard the r men break spinning around. Let's hear what they sound together.

A

A

Where's the arm and break well, if you're a professional programmer- and this is an interview question- um why can't you hear the r men break? um I'm sure some of you are screaming out to me: it's because you've got a single threaded application and the loop is infinite and the program never exits a loop okay. What do you mean? So, let's think about this. The code starts at the top of the program and works its way down.

A

Typically, what happened in most traditional programming languages, so we get to this loop. Here's the first thing really these two lines here are blank and this means loop forever. So we play our sample our bass, drum. We wait for half a second and then we loop around play a sample, wait for half a second, then we loop around and loop around and we loop around forever and we never ever ever get down down here. So that's a problem, so the solution to this is to use threads.

A

Now they might be a nightmare concept that uh you sort of. Oh, don't touch them, you get out your garlic and and then you hung them away like vampires, but inside sonic pie. Actually, threads are really nice and they're really friendly and the way to use threads inside sonic pie is to use live loops. Let's call this kick, let's call this drums, you give them names, and then you run the code.

A

You can hear that when you're actually kicking it's not.

A

A

Let's change the cutoff of this drum.

A

So live loops have two cool properties. One is that they can play things at the same time, so this idea of concurrency, so this actually is completely natural in a band. Now you have a singer and a guitarist and a bass player. They will all play at the same time to make the band, but they do another thing actually, which is pretty critical, which is play playing not just at the same time but in time.

A

So these two threads, the kick thread and the drums thread are not just executing simultaneously, as you might imagine, a traditional programming thread to do. They also play in time, which means that the kick drums kicks exactly the same time as the r men starts and no matter how long they play they don't drift out of time. They don't drift back in time and mess around there's. No none of that everything's completely hard synced. I mean I've spent a long, a lot of time and effort actually behind the scenes making this work.

A

A lot of my time has gone into making the timing system as precise and deterministic and accurate as I can. I'm still working on that as well, so we had the concurrency, but there was one other thing: we could change the code as it runs and that's a critical thing. This is this: is the sort of the opening gateway to what we call live coding being able to play the code and modify it as it runs, and when you see me perform in my performance you'll see me writing a bunch of these live loops.

A

They're all doing a simple thing, but a few of them together combine to make something interesting and complicated, just like if you took out the basis of a band and just played them on her own she's, probably going to play quite a simple riff and the guitarist she's also going to probably play a subaru but put them together, and that sounds much more interesting. That's the same with live loops each one of them probably only does a simple thing, but combined together, you get really cool effects.

A

So this really is the opening point to exploring more of what sonic pie can do. You can use it to get started? You can use it to get started with six year old children.

A

Anyone who can essentially type and read with play and sleep you can start advancing into different, sounds controlling those sounds: adding effects using iteration and then also starting to live code with live loops which let you play multiple things at the same time, so one live loop, doing the bass, one live loop, doing the synth riffs one live loop, doing the drums and then bringing them all together and modifying them as they're running to make that performance.

A

And if you want to get more, you get started, learn more about this. You want to actually open up the tutorial, so you just click on the help system, and you can see here. There's a full tutorial built in this is also available on the website. If I go to the website, you can actually see that I can click on the tutorial section and I can work my way through the website as well. So you can, you can read everything.

A

I've shown you and a lot more on the tutorial, but let's finish with a challenge, so I hope that you might be interested in getting started and also possibly contributing something into my performance.

A

So I can bring in your code and use it to make your sounds come out of of the speakers of my performance and integrate it with what I'm doing and so for that, rather than just ask you to make anything and figure out a way to to somehow stitch it together in a way that makes sense, I'm going to ask you to work with the e 3.

A

Minor pentatonic scale now, if this doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry. This is kind of like a color palette. If you're designing a website, your designer might give you a bunch of colors and say only use these colors, please this particular red this particular green, this particular yellow or whatever the colors are. As long as you stick to those color palette of colors, it's going to be fine and this scale is essentially a color palette of notes.

A

It's just a list. Actually, I can print that on the right hand, side- and you can actually see here- uh it's 52, 55, 57, 59, 62 and 64. there, your notes. So if we will stick with those notes uh and then we can do anything with them, so I'm going to I'm going to spend the next 1 minute 30, giving you as many ideas as possible and as long as you're working with these notes.

A

It doesn't matter just throw it at me and there's a link below to submit your code a few lines of code, so a valid submission would be. Let's say: let's give this a name notes and let's do seven dot times do play notes, dot, choose sleep for one second end there we go.

A

Oh that's a valid solution, so this would be. This could be a solution just take this code and submit it to the link below. But what I would recommend is start with something like this and then just slowly tweak it. What happens if we make the release time short yeah and add some.

A

Reverb changes in size to one maybe use synth to be three or three, maybe cut off seven feet, maybe a random cutoff between 1730. Remember all these things, I'm showing you in the tutorial. If you want to learn more yeah, that's nice maybe choose a low e.

A

Depending if you're making a bass line, maybe even choose a different timing or randomizer timing, all these options are yours.

A

I'm looking for a short piece of code that uses the e3 minor pentatonic scale, whatever synthesizers, whatever timings, whatever release times and cutoffs, and all things you want to play with choose your own play around with it does not need to be complicated and then submit it to the link below and I'll bring them all together and bring them into my performance.

A

Okay, so that's me done. uh Thank you so much for watching my workshop. I hope that this hopefully gets you started ex really excited, hopefully to understand. The true potential of code is not just for making business apps.

A

It's also for humans expressing themselves in new ways and music is a beautiful medium for that expression, and I really hope that some of you might start to your adventure of exploring how you might express yourself with code and music using sonic pi today, and I really hope that one day in the future, I can come and see some of you perform and come to your gigs and crazy dance. Like a like a mad person who dances to people who make music with their coding system, I'm sure that happens to everybody anyway.

A

Thank you so much for watching and I hope for you to see you all around soon. Thank you. Bye.