Kodsnack 723 - Bach and Beethoven and the dots and the lines, with Sam Aaron

Fredrik talks to Sam Aaron about Sonic pi - the tool for learning, coding, and performing music. Whe discuss where it stated but more importantly how it has evolved during the past year - coming to the web and gaining lots of performance and features in the process.

Sam also discusses how to build reliable things when working on an indisde-out bottle ship, blindfolded and with a gaslighting agent as your help.

Recorded during the excellent Goatmire Elixir 2026 conference.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Links

• Sam
• Support Sam on Patreon!
• Goatmire
• Sonic pi
• Kristoffer
• Tau5
• Sam’s talk last year
• Elixir
• Lua
• Guy Brown at University of Sheffield
• Bleep - the synth Sam built with Guy
• Supercollider
• James MaCartney
• Audio worklet
• Cmake
• Web audio
• Gaslighting
• Open sound control
• Ring buffer
• The Supersonic demo with lots of observability
• Sam’s PhD - A domain specific language for dynamic interest management within virtual environments
• Western musical notation
• Bach
• Beethoven
• Aphex twin
• Juce - open framework for audio stuff
• DSP
• Supersonic
• Hard real time
• Rust
• OTP - essentially Erlang’s standard library
• University of Cambridge
• Cambridge festival
• Alan Blackwell - Sam’s PhD supervisor
• Support Kodsnack on Ko-fi
• QT
• Live loops in Sonic pi
• Overtone
• Clojure
• Jeff Rose
• Jonathan Graham
• Meta-ex - Sam and Jonathan’s former band
• Emacs
• Raspberry pi
• Raspberry pi foundation
• Ruby
• mruby - Ruby for embedded systems
• ESP32 - chip that Sonic pi, also, runs on
• Evan Czaplicki - the creator of Elm - was a guest in episode 604
• Rick Hickey
• Hammock driven development

Titles

• Vaporware
• Research-led
• Live-coding music systems
• Missing the important part
• A special kind of worker
• It knew I wanted a synthesizer
• Inside-out ship in a bottle
• A lying, gaslighting system
• Ticks with the audio hardware
• On the tick
• Tons of observability
• Bach and Beethoven and the dots and the lines
• Notate your score
• Notate Aphex twin
• A better supercollider
• You’re the thinker
• How slow am I prepared to go?
• The creative potential of programming