Kill the DJ (And Replace Them With a Ruby Script)
Music production has become a spreadsheet exercise. You drag a WAV file. You align it to the grid. You press spacebar. Congratulations, you are a localized Spotify client.
Live Coding is different. Live Coding is performance without a safety net. It is closer to Jazz than it is to Engineering. You are writing Ruby code. On stage. While people are dancing. If you make a typo, the music stops. If you get a SyntaxError, the club goes silent.
Why Sonic Pi?
Because it uses Ruby. Yes, Ruby. The language that “doesn’t scale.” Guess what? It scales fine when you only have ONE user (you) and that user is trying to make a 303 bassline.
The Loop
This is the “Hello World” of Algorave:
live_loop :techno do sample :bd_haus sleep 1 end It looks simple. But you can change that sleep 1 to sleep 0.5 while it is running. You are modifying the engine of the car while driving down the highway at 100mph.