Making sound and music with Live Coding:

First steps on Debian

Schedule

• Live coding definition
• Tools and languages
• Install and setup
• Live coding practice 🎧

Live coding is…

• Sound art, visual art, others…
• A community building technology free from utilitarism constraints

See also:

• on-the-fly.documentary (2022)
• Eulerroom Equinox TOPLAP Community (2020)
• Algorave Generation Resident Advisor (2019)
• Live-Coding programming masterly music (2018)
• Algorave: algorithmic dance culture (2017)

Community

TOPLAP

Algorave

The Stack

Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor.

atom.io

TidalCycles is a live coding environment for musical improvisation and composition, it is a domain-specific language embedded in Haskell.

tidalcycles.org

 SuperCollider

SuperCollider is an audio server, programming language, and IDE for sound synthesis and algorithmic composition.

supercollider.github.io

JACK is a professional sound server and pair of daemons to provide real-time, low-latency connections for audio and MIDI data.

jackaudio.org

PulseAudio is a sound server system for POSIX OSes and it is an integral part of all relevant modern Linux distributions.

pulseaudio.org

PipeWire improve handling of audio and video under Linux that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both pulseaudio and JACK.

pipewire.org

Let’s Start

🎧

$ sudo apt install \
    cabal-install \
    git \
    jackd2 \
    supercollider \
    sc3-plugins

$ scide

Quarks.checkForUpdates({
  Quarks.install("SuperDirt", "v1.7.3");
  thisProcess.recompile();
});

Install Tidal Cycles

$ cabal update
$ cabal install tidal --lib

Install Atom and tidalcycles plugin

• Install from Atom.io, Flatpak.org or Snapcraft.io
• Edit ↪ Preferences ↪ Install ↪ “tidalcycles”
• Create and save a file as “debconf22.tidal”
• Packages ↪ TidalCycles ↪ Boot Tidal Cycles

🎧

cycle = 1 second

🎧

cycle = 1 second

cycle = 1 second

Alternatives

• ChucK
• FoxDot
• Gibber
• ORCΛ
• Pure Data
• Sonic Pi

See also: github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding