Lambda Days 2021 - Duncan McGreggor

Lambda Days 2021 - Teaser for "Sound on BEAM" Talk

Sound on BEAM: Music in the Land of Distributed Lisp

While not built for sound or digital signal processing, Erlang excels in the realm where music control systems have converged: network message-passing. In this talk, Duncan will provide some brief background and share previous related sound-generation work on the BEAM, then cover a recent effort in Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) to integrate with well-established improvisational tools and music recording systems. Full use of LFE/OTP behaviours and supervision trees will be covered, as well as application start phases for synchronising system startup. In addition, LFE's strength as a platform for creating DSL's will be covered in the dual context of integrating with multiple systems and creating generative music.

The music for the video was created with LFE and undertone running the Extempore backend for MIDI control, using 9 tracks of SynthMaster 2.9 as VST plugins in StudioOne 4. "CONJVNCTIO IOVIS ET SATVRNI" is the first piece by the Forgotten Tones project and is named after the historic astronomical event that was occurring in the final moments of the composition's completion. The full ~10 min piece will be published soon on SoundCloud.

Images used in the video include: