"The shadowy DJ sets, knob-tweaking noise and fogbank ambient of many Moogfest performers was completely demystified and turned into simple numbers and letters that you could see in action. Dubbed "the live coding synth for everyone," it truly seemed less like a performance and more like an invitation to code your own adventure."
If you check out the most recent release (as of 40 mins ago) you should see that Emacs Live now includes the most recent CIDER. You just need to include the following in your ~/.lein/profiles.clj
Given that Emacs Live has received new interest over here - I've just pushed a new release - v1.0beta28. This has support for all the latest Clojure goodies as well as many other lib updates :-)
You don't need to modify your code as it plays. However, if you do you turn what's a more traditional composition style workflow into a much more exciting, expressive performance workflow.
When I gig with Sonic Pi all I do is modify the code on-the-fly. It allows me to react to the crowd, the environment and my feelings :-)
Sonic Pi does borrow (steal) a lot of ideas from Overtone. However, the goals are fundamentally different. Overtone aims to give you (the programmer) as much power as possible to create new instruments. Sonic Pi aims to be as simple as possible for everyone (including programmers) to use code to make music.
That said, we still aim to increase the power Sonic Pi offers. It's just that we'll not add any features that make it more complex than it already is without serious thought :-)
Sonic Pi has three broad goals. One is to give coders a very low-friction entry point to live coding music. Second is to create a musical instrument capable of being taught in school music lessons. The third (and primary) goal is to provide a way to engage learners with coding (of any age but typically in schools).
The numbers primarily work with goals 1 and 3 because you don't feel like you have to know any music theory to make noise and simple melodies. They also work with 2 because it's pretty easy to transpose (+ 12) and modulate the main notes. Using floats also enables you to specify notes between semitones (play 30.235).
Additionally...
Sonic Pi also supports specifying notes as symbols: play :Eb3. You have access to a large corpus of scales and chords and you can also modify the BPM globally or local to specific threads. You can even access scales using positions such as :iv.
We're always looking for new ideas - especially ones that provide new way to manipulate music concepts through code that give people greater access to concepts they would typically find hard to understand through formal theory.
Also, we're just looking for ways to make Sonic Pi more fun to jam with...
I did have a microphone attached to me - but for some reason they didn't go with that audio-stream. I agree, it's a little difficult to follow for the first couple of minutes - but it does get better.
Hopefully they weren't applauding the dubstep, rather the compelling notion that with a tool like Overtone they can trade in their programming skills for musicality. That and the other million cool things that simply fall out when your synthesis, composition and performance are all representable in a formal language...
Max is very cool - however the biggest issue for me is its lack of support for abstractions. This typically results in an insanely complicated visual program for everything except for the most trivial examples.
One of the core goals for Overtone is to provide the means for musicians to share their ideas through a programming-language-like notation. This means readability and understandability are at least, if not more important, to expressiveness with the language.
Overtone should be easy to grok, not appear to be some cryptic puzzle.