Overtone is live programmable music and visualization

There seem to be a lot of "music programming language" posts all of a sudden on HackerNews, many of which, like this one, have existed for years. Not that it's a problem, but I wonder why the sudden interest.

bhaak• 4 years ago

There was a link to Lilypond a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625450

It was titled '"Compiling" Music' and some commentators took it not in the TeX way but in music being created programmatically.

chaosprint2• 4 years ago

Probably because last week was the Algorave 10th birthday, an iconic event for music live coding, and we had a 24-hour performance stream:

https://ten.algorave.com/

So here's the language (yet another) I used for the performance:

Glicol: Graph-oriented live coding language and audio DSP library written in Rust for making music in browsers

website:

https://glicol.org

repo:

https://github.com/chaosprint/glicol

bradrn• 4 years ago

Wow, glicol looks amazing! One of the few music languages I’ve seen which actually tries to balance low-level synthesis with higher-level sequencing. (The only other one I know of is extempore: https://extemporelang.github.io/)

MikeTheGreat• 4 years ago

I'm looking at https://ten.algorave.com/ and it looks like a web page for a live stream (so, just like you said :) ).

Obviously, the live stream for last week is no longer live.

Is there a recording of it somewhere?

avindroth• 4 years ago

+1 to Orca, a similar impressive project

https://100r.co/site/orca.html

maxime_cb• 4 years ago

Also going to plug in NoiseCraft since we're talking about music live coding: https://noisecraft.app/101

suyash• 4 years ago

Nice to see another creative coding tool built using JDK technologies.

timdiggerm• 4 years ago

The website header makes it look like this is called Covertone

itazula• 4 years ago

I thought so too, then thought perhaps it was a nod to Clojure.

dang• 4 years ago

Emacs Live (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11951628 - June 2016 (43 comments)

Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446223 - April 2016 (98 comments)

Afterglow – A live-coding lighting controller, built with Clojure and Overtone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11046695 - Feb 2016 (4 comments)

Clojure and Overtone Driving Minecraft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127963 - March 2015 (15 comments)

Overtone – Collaborative Programmable Music with Clojure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824789 - May 2014 (5 comments)

Collaborative Programmable Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818905 - Nov 2013 (18 comments)

Live coding (music) with Emacs Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4522336 - Sept 2012 (16 comments)

Programming Music with Overtone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832499 - April 2012 (25 comments)

Building an iPad interface for Overtone in ClojureScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615022 - Feb 2012 (9 comments)

Overtone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089010 - Oct 2011 (73 comments)

beepbooptheory• 4 years ago

These things are undoubtedly cool. Pisonic is great, just vanilla supercollider with the JIT things like Pdef are really cool, Orca, as others have mentioned, is simply beautiful and work unto itself.

But with all these "live" programmable music things, I fail to find anything lasting in what they produce as works of music/art, I much prefer to see the software itself, and its potentialities, as the "work" that others continually express with them.

I love making music with computers, but there is so much infrastructure around things needing to be "realtime" and responsive, minimal latency, a million knobs on your controller, abstract grid controllers, high precision encoders (basically anything Monome has done), tons of ways to route and reroute data, all for the purpose of "performing" your toys. All so many things that are not really necessary to create something. Making digital music is so much more rewarding when your are not trying to plan a set to perform them. Thinking about the kinds of things computers can do ahead of time, and not just "just in time," opens up so much more creativity and ways of thinking about making music. And very importantly (for me), you can save your wallet, and not have to get lost in the dark money pit of buying equipment, or wanting to buy equipment, all the time.

These things definitely have their place and I think they are themselves beautiful, but there is a tension in them that is not really necessary.

If you want to hear some cool things you can make with just some extreme talent, imagination, and MaxMSP, without this emphasis put on being "performable" and realtime, look to Carl Stone [1]. He is just walking circles around everyone else, and really really showing what computers can do in the interest of art, rather than in the interest of being some techno-nerd rockstar.

1. https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/stolen-car

iainctduncan2• 4 years ago

Hi, if you're interested in Overtone, you might be interested in my projects as well, Scheme for Max and Scheme for Pure Data. They use s7 Scheme, a very clojurish Scheme implementation designed for computer music needs by Bill Schottstaedt at CCRMA, of Common Lisp Music fame. Part of my motivation for creating it was to overcome some of what I perceived as limitations in options such as Overtone and Pink. https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

Unfortunately Overtone is not really active anymore, the its replacement loses the lisp!

Other interesting Scheme/Lisp based systems in similar areas are Extempore (formerly impromptu), Nyquist (by Dannenburg, another godfather of the field), and Common Music.

bsedlm• 4 years ago

Another interesting tool in this space is called Tidal Cycles http://tidalcycles.org/

It's written in Haskell, and seems to do something very interesting with the way to define looping patterns.

javajosh• 4 years ago

"The Overtone window" is the application window and also describes how well the software is accepted over time.

stevehiehn• 4 years ago

I'm really into this project called https://www.bespokesynth.com/ Its allows for a hybrid of modular synths + python scripting

Overtone is live programmable music and visualization

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