Sonic Pi Workshop

Faculty of Education, 19 June 2019, rev. June 2020
E Reed. ereed - at - swchs.net

Contents

• Summary
• Advantages over other software
• Disadvantages
• Resources for learners
  • Forum
  • mehackit
  • Raspberry Pi Foundation
  • Sam Aaron
  • Youtube
  • Codecademy: Ruby
  • Blogs and isolated posts
  • Art thoughts
• Research and further reading
• Sonic Pi in use
• Other stuff

Summary

1. Low barrier to entry but difficult to master
2. Another means of analysing and expressing music
3. Tangible outcomes or high degree of abstraction:
   • Art as process or concept? Music as mechanism?¹
4. Errors highlighted immediately
5. STEM funding?

Advantages over other software

Bold = serious advantage over other music tech software

1. Maths
   • Randomisation
   • Choice
   • Mathematical processes
   • Microtones
   • Polyrhythm
   • Phasing and polytempo
2. Music tech
   • Synthesis
     • Envelope control (ADSR)
     • Amp, pan, and other controls via in-line options or use_synth_defaults/use_sample_defaults
   • Samples
     • Built-in samples
     • External samples just by quoting path
     • Quickly change rate and pitch
     • Reverse!
   • Oscilloscope!
   • Live control through live_loop
   • OSC and MIDI I/O
   • Live audio in through synth :sound_in and live_audio²
3. Computer science
   • Loops + iteration
   • Ruby methods (playing with strings of notes to change their order)
     • .tick and .look
     • .reverse
     • Randomisation with .choose and .shuffle
   • Chaining a ring
   • Defining and recalling functions
     • Piping variables into the function
   • Text-based, easy to share
   • The audible made visible (and not Western notation)
4. Other features
   • Free
   • Record audio straight from the programme and control in real time
   • Built-in tutorial and code examples

Disadvantages

1. Maths
   • Easy to make addition mistakes so that loops don’t synchronise
2. Sequential programming rather than concurrency; slight difficulty of live_loop and the friction between concurrent live_loops and linear compositions. This can be bridged with in_thread, but which do you privilege in a short SoW?
3. Music tech
   • Text based so difficult to visualise, e.g. pitch of notes, envelope shape…
   • Clunky MIDI and Audio I/O. Compare this to Logic, for example.
4. Computer science
   • Sterility? Relative difficulty of introducing amp: options or other expression
5. Students might be better than you! (problem?)

Resources for learners

A repo of resources at https://github.com/MrReedSWCHS/resources

Forum

• in-thread.sonic-pi.net
  Official forums

mehackit

• https://sonic-pi.mehackit.org/exercises/en/01-introduction/01-introduction.html
  Excellent and comprehensive course from beginner to expert. Lots of links to music theory and accompanying graphics/explanations. Highly recommended for use in lessons.

Raspberry Pi Foundation

• https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-sonic-pi
  More basic but still very useful course.

• https://github.com/raspberrypilearning/sonic-pi-lessons
  (Archived) Scheme of work developed by Pi foundation for the Live & Coding research project.

• https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi-issues/Essentials_Sonic_Pi-v1.pdf
  Magpi magazine. A bit old now but a great PDF resource. Good ideas for making printed resources of your own.

Sam Aaron

• https://www.instagram.com/samaaron

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK1mBqKvIyU - TED talk

• https://vimeo.com/363992110 - Determinism, synchronicity and concurrency

• https://sonic-pi.net/tutorial.html
  The easiest resource, since it’s baked into the app itself (just click the Help button in Sonic Pi). A great online resource too, presented in an ebook style.

• https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net/t/sonic-pi-online-resources/17
  Forum thread containing loads of resources

Youtube

• https://www.youtube.com/user/daveconservatoire
  Dave Conservatoire. 30 videos! Great stuff. While you’re at it, check out his MuseScore series

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxJoOXhg8m5LbBzczDCeZ4wzky1K578SS
  Excellent series. A real computer science perspective, as opposed to Dave Conservatoire which is more musical.

Codecademy: Ruby

• https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-ruby
  Since Sonic Pi uses Ruby, this would be a useful course for teachers or to direct students who wanted to master the computer science elements.

Blogs and isolated posts

• “My Year Teaching Sonic Pi” - You’ll have to search the forums, but he has written about his experiences over 22 weeks.
• https://rbnrpi.wordpress.com/
• https://manwaringmusic.blog/2018/04/24/sonic-pi-diaries-pt-2/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p031dq3j - Sonic Pi and BBC Ten Pieces
• http://ecotronics.ch.honorius.sui-inter.net/wordpress/2017/sonic-pi-advanced-programming/

Art thoughts

• Conceptual art project

Research and further reading

• Collins (2016): Live coding and teaching SuperCollider: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/17855/1/17855.pdf
• https://algorave.com/
• https://toplap.org/

Sonic Pi in use

• A playlist of my explorations and my students’ work: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzqDorR42SQpTcLEXTBuj-D0rAYYI52A
• Sonic Pi in use in the Albert Hall: https://vimeo.com/328673793#t=59m10s

Other stuff

• https://github.com/tmcw/big - Simple JS presentations.
• http://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/ - Simple web storage.
• http://www.gitbook.com - WYSIWYG ebook/tutorial creation. Absolutely brilliant. Great github integration if you fancy.
• https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/ - My instructional website written in R Markdown
• https://www.patreon.com/samaaron - Sonic Pi needs support to continue development

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1. Analogies of process art or conceptual art, e.g. Sol LeWitt 1, 2, Haegue Yang… ↩

2. Don’t forget to stop! live_audio :foo, :stop ↩