Panel:


Dave Kimura
Eric Berry


Special Guest: Sam Aaron

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Sam Aaron who is the creator of Sonic Pi, which is the main topic that he and the panel talk about today. Sam is a computer scientist who has his Ph.D., and uses the Ruby language. He is also a programmer, educator, live coding musician, and father.

Show Topics:

1:25 – Panelist: Tell us what you are doing?

1:27 – Sam: Good question. I do a lot of different things and I try to challenge programming and take it a new

How can I be the most expressive person with code? I have written things to write music with code.

2:00 – Code is just a medium like dancing and writing. You can write to write code but as to write poetry.

2:33 – Tell us about Sonic Pi – the project you have developed to generate music from code.

2:42 – Sam: It’s a very simple program. It’s an app that you can run on Mac or Windows and others. It was written as a response to the UK opening a new system. How can we get children engaged? And this was my answer to that question.

3:37 – Was this developed by a team?

3:41 – Sam: Most of it was developed by myself – no real team – but a lot of it was through open source.

4:01 – What was the motivation? Why music; why not a drawing library like something visual?

4:19 – Sam: Many years ago I had a tragedy in the family. I was struggling mentally with it. One thing that helped me was I picked up a book on a specific language.

When I see these visual systems...it can be very daunting and difficult. To me when I use programming tools I thought naturally music.

6:14 – Can you talk about the architecture of Sonic Pi?

6:50 – Guest: Sonic Pi came purely from response and had a small amount of money to spend – teaching kids how to code. I wanted to get this overtone.

I used to be a Ruby programmer. The original core was taken from these overtones. And the way it works is that you have a simple server, Ruby server, and...

Three separate processes all talking over the network.

9:08 – I want to give the listeners an idea of what this sounds like – it’s pretty amazing.

Here is a sound that is 4 lines of code in Ruby. Can you tell us what is going in to make that sound work?

9:37 – Sam: The bottom layer is...the different waveforms for that sound clip. There is a mathematician who figured out...

Sam talks about how sound works and how Sonic Pi works.

12:24 – Sam: The way to record a sound and the way to...

12:35 – Acid Walk – let’s take a listen.

12:50 – That is purely very intricate – that was about 60-80 lines.

13:00 –Sam: The bass line was...and the ticking sound was how long to wait again. It sounds complicated but take notes from a scale (different color palettes of notes) – notes you pick from. It will create the melody randomly for you. Adding some distortions and reverbs, etc.

14:03 – I am not musically inclined. So when I think of Raspberry Pi – why did you choose Ruby and not Python for developing the Sonic Pi engine?

14:27 – Sam: Your statement – “You are not musically inclined,” bothers me. We can all wave our arms around and dance. Having that mind thought is a barrier to your well-being. There was an interview with a lady over 100 years old. Any regrets? When I was 80 – I could have been playing for 20 years!

15:43 – Sam: My contract was about to expire and then was the same year that Raspberry Pi released and had staggering success. They didn’t necessarily have...

Every week I went into the classroom with a different version.

Actually there are different pros and cons in an educational context.

19:00 – Looking at the Sonic Pi in Ruby but also some Erlang in there?

19:15 – Sam: I talked earlier about the three components.

Sam talks in-detail about Ruby and why he also used some Erlang. 

22:30 – Sam: Erlang has a beautiful design and there is no garbage collector. It was the right architecture. I thought – how am I going to sit down and learn Erlang? Well you just make friends. An