Programming as Performance | Sam Aaron | TEDxNewcastle

Sam Aaron, and Postdoc Researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, will be discussing the idea of programming as performance, examining the importance of emphasising, exploring and celebrating creativity within all aspects of the skillset.

Sam Aaron is a live coder who considers programming as performance and strongly believes in the importance of emphasising, exploring and celebrating creativity within all aspects of programming.

Sam believes that a programming environment which has sufficient liveness, rapid feedback and tolerance of failure to support the live performance of music is an environment ripe for mining novel ideas that will not only benefit artistic practices themselves but also the computer industry more generally.

In pursuit of this unique perspective Sam is the lead developer of Overtone and Quil, powerful live coding platforms for music and visuals. Sam is also the creator of Sonic Pi, a music live coding environment used to teach programming within schools.

By day Sam is a Postdoc Researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and by night he codes music for people to dance to.

[monkeypuzzle]

I'm 31 now - A self taught web-developer and music maker and audio engineer. I wish they'd taught me about computers and modern technology when I was at school. It was the most boring subject and not creative in any way. It was a real struggle to learn programming and creative use of computers in my late twenties. Obviously we should have had this guy as a teacher instead! Thanks for the video :)

[SuperBoinger]

I got a raspberry pi2 this last Xmas, have been self-teaching programming for at least 7 months now, I was amazed by Sonic Pi, had no idea it was included in the RPI. I'm finally getting the hang of programming, and my only regret is not starting sooner! (I'm 23)
Thank you very much for the brilliant work Sam Aaron!

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”


― Friedrich Nietzsche

[Josh-lxqt]

He makes a really good point about programming... you can do so much with programming.

[cubicinfinity]

I majored in math and computer science. My job is neither, but I use them all the time. This talk has helped me to be okay with that. Also, Sonic Pi helped me get in to music.

[broepi]

damn TEDx .... Y U NOT show us the screen when Sam's typing code -.-

[alensiljak]

You have no idea how many times I sent a link to this video to all the people making the same excuse in various Open Source projects. Thank you for such a great way of explaining the essence in just the first five minutes!

[TheMcSebi]

It's always useful to have full control over machines. No matter if you learn to drive a car or to program a computer, both is not required to survive in life, but it does come in handy at times.

[yaneexy]

Thank You For Your Space of Consciousness and just follow your heart ...and Thank You, You are give this Gift to Me,
I think Was A Lot of work to make this work, Very Thank You!!

[OrangeDurito]

Audience didn't get it at all. This is whole paradigm shift in music similar to what EDM brought in 70s and 80s and look at it now. We have this massive fan following, there are countless music festivals garnering millions of audience and it's a flourishing billion dollar industry. This is what it is now. THIS IS HUGE AND EXCITING. I just came to know about Sonic Pi in 2022 and I have been playing with it for the past few days. It is absolutely fabulous piece of technology. We are still at the early stage of this revolution.

[BernhardWeichel]

interesting talk, but I would like to see what he is doing - Should have shown the screen

[cardboardmusic]

Nice talk. As a coder and music teacher I can agree with what Sam says. I'm not sure what Sam says is (about mainstream musical knowledge and kids) is totally true. I'd also like to ask why we're not talking about SuperCollider, Chuck, CSound, Impromtu, Earsketch and several more.

[jt]

The argument here are NUTS! I've seen personally myself how computer and technology can actually diminish and decapitate musical skills! Students start relying mainly on computer to produce sounds, pitches, and chords, without actually understanding the underlying mechanisms and theoretical knowledge behind them. I have a student who are proud to tell stories about how a music-making software (along the line of ableton or something) can produce arpeggio chords automatically, without himself being able to play these arpeggios fluently on his instrument. My composition teacher once tells me about the effect of music notation software on student-composers: it is easy to copy and paste music on music notation software and thus instead of telling and making sure these software serve their musical intention, most often students tend to be constrained by the ingrained ability of the notation software. Another teacher of mine, this time a piano teacher, tells about the unhelpful ingrained capacity of an electric keyboard to create the sounds of chords from a shortcut function she calls the 'Casio Chords'. Thus instead of learning chords properly on the keyboard, these students learn that C minor can be produced by pressing the key C with D, which resembles nothing like C minor at all in a real piano. Effective musical skills need to be built with persistence and intelligence, alongside playing musical instruments and understanding theoretical knowledge.

I am not against technological development, but please put technology in the right place. Young people nowadays has been exposed with more and more technology and it has been shown how it is starting to negatively impact their development. Children nowadays are in risk of having little social skills, shorter concentration span, as they have the tendency to want something fast and instant.

[NamanMalhotra]

He worked on two major codes:

1.
notes = (scale :e3, :minor_pentatonic)

live_loop :foo do
sample :loop_industrial, beat_stretch: 1, rate: 1
sleep 1
end


live_loop :beats do
sample :bd_haus, amp: 0
sleep 0.5
end

live_loop :vortex do
use_synth :tb303
play notes.choose, release: 0.1, cutoff: 100
sleep 0.125
end

2. An Example called Rerezzed


use_debug false
notes = (scale :e1, :minor_pentatonic, num_octaves: 2).shuffle

live_loop :rerezzed do
tick_reset
t = 0.04
sleep -t
with_fx :bitcrusher do
s = synth :dsaw, note: :e3, sustain: 8, note_slide: t, release: 0
64.times do
sleep 0.125
control s, note: notes.tick
end
end
sleep t
end

live_loop :industry do
sample :loop_industrial, beat_stretch: 1
sleep 1
end

live_loop :drive do
sample :bd_haus, amp: 3
sleep 0.5
end

[iTomAnks]

This is amazing, like a more intuitive MAX - very inspirational

[znopeusz]

great talk. I feel the same – the skill of coding is going to be as important as writing and counting. But for this to become reality it is not enough just to state it. Comparing coding to writing is an exaggeration. Writing/reading became prolific because of the needs of everyday life, signing contracts and reading newspapers. And there was already a common language used by people *everyday*. But with coding? how often do you use that exact procedural formalized thinking in everyday situations? Nevertheless I fully appreciate and support introduction to programming through music live coding as it helps developing logical thinking and ability to solve problems more quickly.

[aqsaleh]

It's the most interesting thing I have ever seen keep it up

[simoneicardi]

It would be nice to see the screen while he's typing.. anyway, this is awesome!

[TheYugamer]

someone needs to do can can in sonic pi

[Matt-uzjf]

Cool video, didn't know making music was that easy via code, so good job developing it! Is this pre-installed on the Pi? Just started learning Python, not learning to code really isn't an excuse in modern life.

[RodrigoDLM]

You could double the inspiration just by showing the screen with the code you are typing, great presentation though