Every generation of musicians for the past 8 decades has had the same thoughts. What live coding tools for synthesis offers you is an understanding of the nature of generational technology.

Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?

This is happening for the kids, again.

Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.

> I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).

Aside from the novelty factor (due to very different UI/UX) and the idea that you can use generative code to make music (which became an even more interesting factor in the age of LLMs), I agree.

And even the generative code part I mentioned is a novelty factor as well, and isn't really practical for someone who actually makes music as their end-goal (and not someone who is just experimenting around with tech or how far one can get with music-as-code UIUX).

Procedural generation is useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. I would agree that it's not always best to go full procedural generation, because often you want to impose some structure on those ideas using traditional grid-based methods.

100% agree.

I think this format of composition is going to encourage a highly repetitive structure to your music. Good programming languages constrain and prevent the construction of bad programs. Applying that to music is effectively going to give you quantization of every dimension of composition.

I'm sure its possible to break out of that but you are fighting an uphill battle.

Look into the JUCE framework for building your own tools. I was using MaxMsp for a while, but would always think to myself "This would be so much easier to accomplish in pure code". So, I started building some bespoke VST's.

There's a learning curve for sure, but it's not too bad once you learn the basics of how audio and MIDI are handled + general JUCE application structure.

Two tips:

Don't bother with the Projucer, use the CMAke example to get going. Especially if you don't use XCode or Visual Studio.

If your on a Mac, you might need to self-sign the VST. I don't remember the exact process, but it's something I had to do once I got an M4 Mac.

Fair point, and that's the challenge in both the software's abilities and the creator's skills.

If you see it as yet another instrument you have to master, then you can go pretty far. I'm finding myself exploring rhythms and sounds in ways I could never do in a DAW so fast, but at the same time I do find limiting a lot of factors, especially sequencing.

So far I haven't gotten beyond a good sounding loop, hence the name "loopmaster", and maybe that's the limit, which is why I made a 2 deck "dual" mode in the editor, so that it can be played as a DJ set where you don't really need that much progression.

That said, it's quite fun to play with it and experiment with sounds, and whenever you make something you enjoy, you can export a certain length and use it as a track in your mix.

My goal is certainly to be able to create full length tracks with nuances and variations as you say, just not entirely sure how to integrate this into the format right now.

Feedback[0] is appreciated!

[0]: https://loopmaster.featurebase.app/

I've seen a couple of TikToks with someone doing live coding with this same tool and it was really cool to watch because they really knew it well, but like you said it was bog-standard house/techno.

Often an article posted to hn will cause a mini-trend as users who are engaging with the subject discover and share more related resources.

Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.

My guess is we are either at the top or rising to the top of cyclical curve of the trend.

CSOUND is the oldest code-2-music framework I know of, and that's been here since the 80's, so the concept is not new

The tools/frameworks have become more plentiful, approachable, and mature over the past 10-15 years, to the point where you can just go to strudel.cc and start coding music right from your browser.

Thanks! I tried to make it as familiar as possible, inspired by JS. It's not yet open-source, mainly because the source is a bit of a mess, but it will be once I tidy things up. Follow me on GitHub[0] for updates. Also that sounds to me like Tech-House/Electro-House :D Very nice!

[0]: https://github.com/stagas

My understanding is that because it's a very small sample, it's basically a combination of a subset of sine waves, and because we're very sensitive to the nuances of high-pitched sounds, even small changes in that space make a lot of difference. Every RNG seed produces a different sounding hihat, and if you don't reset it, it continues producing different hihats, which is unnatural. Another explanation is also to resemble sample-based audio, but perhaps it's all of these things combined.

Thanks! For anyone trying this, it's being HN crushed right now and hitting rate-limits, you should try again in a bit if you see an error.

Also, there is an AI DJ mode[0] where you set the mood/genre and the AI generates and plays music for you infinitely.

[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/editor?aidj

I'm considering a VST version but for now there is an Export Audio feature you can use to get a perfect audio loop to use with Ableton (or any other DAW) with oversampling up to 8x for great quality.

I route midi generated by strudel.cc in to my DAW.

Shoutout to PACE who banned scripting in the JUCE 8 license terms so if you wanted to make this using the leading framework, you can't.

I think it's more of a red flag that they chose a name that's one letter away from a well-known site that sells music samples: https://www.loopmasters.com/

Not like a fringe unknown one, but one with over 20 years of history and now-owned by Beatport.