RR 384: “Sonic Pi” with Sam Aaron

Panel: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobaltz- Eric Berry Special Guest: Sam AaronIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Sam Aaron who is the creator of https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors, which is the main topic that he and the panel talk about today. Sam is a computer scientist who has his Ph.D., and uses the Ruby language. He is also a programmer, educator, live coding musician, and father.Show Topics:1:25 – Panelist: Tell us what you are doing?1:27 – Sam: Good question. I do a lot of different things and I try to challenge programming and take it a newHow can I be the most expressive person with code? I have written things to write music with code.2:00 – Code is just a medium like dancing and writing. You can write to write code but as to write poetry.2:33 – Tell us about Sonic Pi – the project you have developed to generate music from code.2:42 – Sam: It’s a very simple program. It’s an app that you can run on Mac or Windows and others. It was written as a response to the UK opening a new system. How can we get children engaged? And this was my answer to that question.3:37 – Was this developed by a team?3:41 – Sam: Most of it was developed by myself – no real team – but a lot of it was through open source.4:01 – What was the motivation? Why music; why not a drawing library like something visual?4:19 – Sam: Many years ago I had a tragedy in the family. I was struggling mentally with it. One thing that helped me was I picked up a book on a specific language.When I see these visual systems...it can be very daunting and difficult. To me when I use programming tools I thought naturally music.6:14 – Can you talk about the architecture of https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors?6:50 – Guest: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors came purely from response and had a small amount of money to spend – teaching kids how to code. I wanted to get this overtone.I used to be a Ruby programmer. The original core was taken from these overtones. And the way it works is that you have a simple server, Ruby server, and...Three separate processes all talking over the network.9:08 – I want to give the listeners an idea of what this sounds like – it’s pretty amazing.Here is a sound that is 4 lines of code in Ruby. Can you tell us what is going in to make that sound work?9:37 – Sam: The bottom layer is...the different waveforms for that sound clip. There is a mathematician who figured out...Sam talks about how sound works and how Sonic Pi works. 12:24 – Sam: The way to record a sound and the way to...12:35 – Acid Walk – let’s take a listen.12:50 – That is purely very intricate – that was about 60-80 lines.13:00 –Sam: The bass line was...and the ticking sound was how long to wait again. It sounds complicated but take notes from a scale (different color palettes of notes) – notes you pick from. It will create the melody randomly for you. Adding some distortions and reverbs, etc.14:03 – I am not musically inclined. So when I think of Raspberry Pi – why did you choose Ruby and not Python for developing the Sonic Pi engine?14:27 – Sam: Your statement – “You are not musically inclined,” bothers me. We can all wave our arms around and dance. Having that mind thought is a barrier to your well-being. There was an interview with a lady over 100 years old. Any regrets? When I was 80 – I could have been playing for 20 years!15:43 – Sam: My contract was about to expire and then was the same year that Raspberry Pi released and had staggering success. They didn’t necessarily have...Every week I went into the classroom with a different version.Actually...