Hackday: Live Coding Music

This year, Caplin Hack Day’s theme was titled ‘Into the Unknown’. Basically, we were allowed to do anything as long as it was something new.

So I did what everyone else did: I looked at my weird-things-that-I-would-like-to-try-one-day list:

• A neural network (using TensorFlow) that know if you are male or female after typing few line of text?

Meh… Kinda boring. And there’s a lot of chances of having no significant results.

• A collar that deliver electric shocks to developer when they break the builds?

Hm… No… Not PC enough. People are not ready yet.

• A rocket that can establish a colony on Mars?

Wait… I think someone is already working on that.

• Using a language to generate music?

Oh ok… That’s actually quite feasible in one day. Also it could be quite fun to demonstrate!

I knew it was possible because few months (years?) ago, a post was trending on hackernews with a dude generating music with some code.

Few searches later, I found back the `Clojure` library allowing us to do that: `Overtone`.

After spending easily half of my 24h on trying to make `Overtone` and the `emacs` live-coding plugin work, the results were quite disappointing… However, it’s at this point that I discovered that Sam Aaron (the guy behind `Overtone`), also did a little something called `Sonic Pi`.

`Sonic Pi` is a mix between `Overtone`, a new language and an IDE. It’s an all-in-one solution that you can install on Mac, Windows and Linux and that lets you focusing on the important part: Live Coding Music.

Conclusion

So, to conclude, and as the Pied Piper tale warned us, let’s keep in mind that music can be quite powerful in a hackathon.