λondon HUG

Next meeting: Alex McLean, Live coding music with Haskell

The next meeting of the London HUG will be on Thursday 17th September at 6:30pm at City University, with a talk by Alex McLean:

Live coding music with Haskell

Literacy, the ability to express ourselves in text, is a big part of what defines the modern human, and so perhaps programming languages are the most human of human-computer interfaces. While a large proportion of the commercial music software industry has been busy reproducing the hardware of a music studio in software, the free software community has developed new ways of making music with programming languages, with recent efforts focused on live coding environments like supercollider 3, ChucK, impromptu and
puredata.

Live coders take advantage of dynamic interpreters to improvise live music (and/or video) with sourcecode, using the computer language as a musical environment. A live code edit is something like changing the design of a machine while it runs, moving cogs and pistons around and adding new ones. Here though the machine is composed of text, describing the functions which the music flows out of. The musician’s editor is projected for the audience so that they see the live coder’s gestures within their text editor, and if they like, read the code as it is written.

In this talk Alex will show how he uses haskell to livecode music, including representing musical patterns, interfacing with synthesis software over the OSC network protocol, and using ghci as an interface in musical improvisation.