'Birdsong as code' by Chris Ford (Strange Loop 2023)

Most people intuitively understand birdsong as a form of music, yet the practical and artistic pressures on bird musicians are very different to those on human artists. In this talk, we will transcribe birdsong into code and use it to investigate how birds' musical structures differ from our own. In doing so, we will take advantage our ability to create novel and context-specific abstractions in code, which is not possible in traditional music notation.

Chris Ford
Director de Tecnología, Thoughtworks España
@ctford

Chris has coded both correct and incorrect programs for many years, although he prefers the former. He has also coded both correct and incorrect musical compositions for many years, though he doesn’t really mind which. As well as a longstanding interest in functional programming, types and continuous delivery, Chris is always interested in learning better ways to write programs that do what they are supposed to do. He is Director de Tecnología for Thoughtworks España based in Barcelona.

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Recorded Sept 22, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO.

[TMQwuke]

Favorite talk from StrangeLoop, the jam session at the end was great fun

[fburton]

This talk resonated with me on an exponential scale. Brilliant!

[faster-than-light-memes]

❤❤I teared up a little at the end. The wholesomeness and scify epic of making music together with the rest of your ecosystems animals. Human potential is deeper than species boundaries ❤

[robertsmme]

Such a great demonstration of curiosity

[isaactfa]

Wow, I'm really glad I stuck around till the very end.

[bartkl]

Very cool talk and jam, thanks!

Also: Clojure and a reference to Steve Reich's Different Trains? Nice touches ;)

[guaposneeze]

Ironically, the nearly half-started language I made when following the Crafting Interpreters tutorial on making your own programming language was called "BirdSong" because I childishly found it entertaining to be able to say "I wrote a bunch of BS."

[everybot-it]

Being so respectful of birds, treating their "song" as music, where in fact it may be actual language (with modulation and rhythm encoding real meaning), analogous to earlier Westerners "thinking" tone languages are actually song.

[thanatosor]

His code theme look like on a 1 bit screen.