Code you can dance to

January 5, 2023 11:14 AM

I first encountered the music of DJ_DAVE when she played an amazing 30 minute set at GitHub Universe 2020. The venue isn't as strange as it sounds, since DJ_DAVE creates music with the live coding tool Sonic Pi, a genre sometimes known as Algorave. A Brief interview. Her music on: SoundCloud, YT, Spotify, and Bandcamp.
posted by gwint (16 comments total)

Folks interested in this sort of thing should also look into TidalCycles, Overtone, and SuperCollider. I believe both of the former are built on top of SuperCollider.

SuperCollider has been used by a lot of artists working with data sonification, so digging around the forum or keyword searching can lead you to some interesting projects.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 12:31 PM on January 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is extremely super cool!
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:52 PM on January 5, 2023

FWIW, Sonic Pi (a terrific project that is demeaned by the clunky term "algorave") is a Ruby wrapper over SuperCollider.
posted by Ayn Marx at 1:39 PM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

FWIW, I've posted a few sonic pi things to music, most with code.
posted by signal at 2:39 PM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ah, SonicPi - the developer was funded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for a while, then got in a massive spat with them after they kept shipping an older stable version that worked instead of all the all-new incompatible-with-written-curriculum release. Very ugly scene indeed
posted by scruss at 2:54 PM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is cool. I played around with Tidal for a bit, but it's very much rooted in rave / EDM and all the tutorials I could find, including the official ones, were based around that type of music. I know that style of music is popular, but I'm not a fan.

The tutorial for SonicPi, so far, is a much easier introduction to the application. This will be a fun way to spend some time.
posted by ralan at 4:48 PM on January 5, 2023

Very much my jam. I own a Norns Shield which is a related supercollidor-on-a-pi device that also includes a DAC to allow it to process audio - kind of a looper/sequencer/synth/what-have-you "sound computer" that allows you to build your own instruments. Also want to shout out ORCΛ, a little sequencer programming language that lets you build little performances that look like an ASCII Rougelike.

Ralan, I am a big fan of these instruments but I'm not an EDM guy per se, there is a lot of very cool music happening in the scene that's not necessarily in those genres. Also check out Flash Crash, which is a series of performances based around another programmatic sequencer, the Teletype.
posted by q*ben at 5:30 PM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

This guy has a response to this music. Imagine being a 70-year old writer reading a ChatGPT piece, a 70-year old visual artist taking DALL-E for a test drive, or a 70-year old jazz pianist listening to this music. I am all three of these people. The writing and the art are pretty understandable, if not in the coding details, at least in the general sense of a computer crunching linguistic/visual data into...something.

But I really have no idea what the artist is doing here. At all. Again, this is from a bar-band Fender-Rhodes guy who picked up Keyboard magazine in the mid-70s and felt like he was reading a computer manual.

The music sounds good..it's just a little strange to realize I don't have a fucking clue about how this music took form. Yes, I am from Planet Earth, but not the same planet many of you all live on.
posted by kozad at 7:11 PM on January 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

Just wondering when the musicians declare this made by AI and try to get it banned.
posted by Sphinx at 11:35 PM on January 5, 2023

→ But I really have no idea what the artist is doing here

Improv, except by rewriting the themes and rules of the piece as the piece is performed.
posted by scruss at 8:10 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, this is what i was going to say. This is much more familiar than AI-generated art; at it’s core Supercollider is just a way to write software instruments, and Sonic Pi is a way to arrange, compose, and conduct. Points of inspiration include guys like Harry Partch and La Monte Young, Cage, etc - build your own instruments and then define the rules by which they operate. But with code you can do this in a way where there is an aspect of performance in the arrangement as you write and re-write the score in front of the audience.
posted by q*ben at 9:01 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've been checking out the compilation "Compassion Through Algorithms" linked as a genre example and it seems like this is basically a new genre name created to cover "Things that sound like what Autechre and friends did 30 years ago"? The approach seems sort of similar to circuit bending, except by bending the code rather than the physical circuits.
posted by FatherDagon at 10:32 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, live coding is nothing like AI generated art. The main objection to the current crop of AI art tools IIRC is that they essentially launder plagiarism at scale. Here, the performer is still an individual musician who is completely responsible for the sounds being produced. They’re not just giving a neural net trained on a giant corpus of other people’s music a prompt and printing the output. From the interview:

Manipulating code live and using code as an instrument is a lot like using a midi controller or a launch pad to cue samples and sounds, but I tell the computer which sounds and samples to play by writing them out in code. I also alter sounds live by changing parameters and adding effects, which makes live coding much more similar to watching someone play an instrument live than perform a DJ set because each performance ends up being a little different.

posted by en forme de poire at 11:05 AM on January 6, 2023

FatherDragon, I think most people consider “Algorave” to be a sub genre of IDM, so, yeah. Autechre used/uses a lot of algorithmic sequencing in their work. Attempting to “correctly” categorize various electronic artists is probably not going to be fruitful. The whole Algorave scene has it’s distinctive features however which is centered around live coding as performance, which is a fairly new idea worthy of independent discussion. Brian Eno has categorized/stigmatized electronic music as replacing virtuosity with judgement, which was probably true for his particular methods but it’s interesting to see the concept of virtuosity and technique return to the genre in different ways.
posted by q*ben at 11:12 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Live coding isn't a genre – it's a technique. You could use it to create any genre of music (that can be created with digital audio).

Also, Autechre didn't invent algorithmic composition.

Also also, live coding isn't defined by algorithmic composition. You certainly could incorporate algorithmic compositional techniques into a live coding performance – but DJ_DAVE doesn't appear to be doing that.

(Simply using a computer means that many different algorithms are involved – but the actual melodies and rhythms in the GitHub set seem to have been composed by DJ_DAVE herself. The term "algorave" is just a cheeky portmanteau.)

Live coding is defined by, well, live coding. It means that the music is generated by a computer program, which serves as a "score" of sorts – and the performer is writing and editing that program ("coding") on the fly ("live"), while the music is playing.

(This is certainly the kind of thing that Autechre would do, but I doubt they did it 30 years ago.)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 2:02 PM on January 6, 2023

Yeah, this is nothing like AI generated anything, which is basically a black box that regurgitates a bunch of other people's IP according to hard-to-perceive rules.
In my experience with Sonic PI, I define a chord progression (though you don't have to) and a way to go from one chord to the next, maybe involving randomness, and a way to pick notes to play over the chords, which could be chordal notes, chromatics, or whatever, and have drum samples and other sounds being triggered according to some other semi-random pattern. Then tweak the probabilities until it sounds cool.
It's a bit like playing music with actual humans, except they're robots and they kind of follow your lead and kind of don't.
posted by signal at 3:39 PM on January 6, 2023