Learn to Write Code, or Learn to Write Music.
This is for everyone who wants to learn some music, and knows how to code. Or, this is for everyone who wants to learn how to code, and knows how to play some music. Sonic Pi is a free software for creating, or synthesizing music via code. That is you have to write a program, to create music. It’s a live coding synthesizer. The idea is to support computing, and music lessons within schools, thus encouraging, and introducing young minds to music, and code. Sonic Pi is the brain child of Sam Aaron , at the University of Cambridge. It was originally designed to work on the Raspberry Pi . Raspberry Pi is an affordable way of owning a computer. You can use it as a music box that teaches you how to code, or create music, for almost nothing. You can download, and use Sonic Pi on Mac OS X, or Windows based machines as well.
Sonic Pi’s interface is quite simple, and powerful. Its tailored for beginners. You can create some great sounding music, with minimal lines of code. Changing the instructions/code, while the music is playing doesn’t affect, or stop the music from playing. But, it immediately affects how the flow of the music, so the edits are instantaneous (live coding synth).
If you know how to play some music, and want to learn more about creating music on the computer, or want to learn how to code, this is a great way to start. Alternatively, if you know how to code, or have some computer science background, and want to learn how to play/create some music or want to learn some basics on music, using this software will help you with that too. It’s a great weekend/summer project. Get into with your kids, or go solo.
Coding New Pathways into Music - The Sonic Pi Live & Coding.
Below is short video on how Sonic Pi is encouraging young students to create music, while learning to code.
Free Lessons on Using Sonic Pi to Create Some Great Sounding Music
Below is an introductory video from Dave Conservatoire . Dave Conservatoire is a free music school for everyone. The site offers free tutorials on Sonic Pi, and basically anything, and everything that has to do with music in general. I stumbled onto Sonic Pi while browsing their website which, I found while searching for sites that offer free tutorials on learning some music theory.
After the initial introduction, you can see how changing the code affects the music playing instantaneously.
