Sonic-Pi and Algorave

Sonic-Pi is a language built around live-coding and producing music algorithmically through code. Its based off Ruby and has a really nice twist that you see often in the live-coding community. This twist is that the code you write is constantly running and and being evaluated so as you write it the music being produced by it changes live.

I find Sonic-Pi a really nice way to relax with programming, it produces code that's inherently temporary and I find that really freeing. It can be easy to get burnt out with code and with Sonic-Pi, when that hits I just delete all my code and start again building something new. In another post I described it as "the programming equivalent of doodling on scrap paper".

I've written a larger post around my thoughts on algorave and live-coding in general here but it doesn't link any of my work so this page is here to represent the music I've created.

My work

Most of my code written in sonic-pi is never saved, that's a part of its process. But I have a few that I'm quite proud of saved. These are both on YouTube and can be found below, they're slow to start since I build up the code over-time so to give a better example of what they sound like these videos should automatically skip to good points.