One of the advantages is teaching people how to code. In it's early days of development, Sam worked with a CS teacher to investigate ways making music with code could help children to learn some computing fundamentals.
We still use it to teach about code and computer science. Last week we released two videos, both using Sonic Pi.
Musicians don’t use ‘one’ music creation mechanism. Musicians use instruments, sure, and musical scores, and they also use audio processing and production systems and digital audio workstations and MIDI controllers...
Some musicians use woodworking tools and materials science to manufacture new instruments to make new sounds. Others use CNC machines and 3D printers. Some use soldering irons and electronic components to build audio processing units and tone generators.
There’s a very active community of modular-synthesizer musicians who take electronic devices and patch them together, adjusting knobs and flicking switches to create music.
And there’s others who build all those same capabilities in software.
And Sonic pi sits on that tradition - of bringing more powerful programmatic tools to bear on the configurability of signal generators and sequencers and audio processing chains as a means to create music.
It's suberb for experimenting with ideas quickly, and serendipitous discovery. The speed at which you can transform an existing idea into a new one can be very inspiring.
Or you can fall down a rabbit hole and end up programming forever without making real music again (what happened to me).
Coding music let's you think about music composition in new ways.
I've found it easy to experiment with looping audio samples at different speeds with Sonic Pi (including backwards) and applying FX effects. Syncing the timing of loops playing is easy with Sonic Pi's `live_loop` cues.
Composing with audio samples has long traditions in magnetic tape manipulation, and later in the isolated beat loops in hip-hop.
Musique Concrète - beginning in the early 1940s - is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material.
Delia Derbyshire used tape manipulation to create the original electronic realisation of the Doctor Who theme score in 1963, and in many other compositions from that decade.
I spent years of my childhood learning to play the piano. I did not have the patience to practice four hours a day , so I never became more than moderately proficient.
And learning to play an instrument does not necessarily mean learning to create music. While playing off sheet music and focusing on dexterity exercises can be rewarding, they are not creative activities.
With Sonic Pi you can focus on music creation and simple programming concepts. It is rewarding in a different way.
> While playing off sheet music and focusing on dexterity exercises can be rewarding, they are not creative activities.
Of all the idiotic things written in the comments of HN (there are plenty...) this has to be, hands down, the most idiotic. There are literally an infinite number of possible expressions in terms of muscle movement & hand / eye coordination involved in an activity like playing the piano & this is BEFORE discussing the activity of using that infinite set of expressions to actually interpret music played from memory, by ear, or from a page. The fact that you think it's not a "creative activity" says more about your lack of creativity than anything else.
Ok. Not the person you're quoting, but I _do_ have ~20yrs experience playing piano, and got to a _decent_ level when I was still pursuing tutoring/classes.
There definitely is a creative aspect to interpretation, and I agree it is big (in potential if not how much it is exploited often). However you're playing with fundamentally different building blocks for your artistic expression. Interpretation is much more subtle; you're leaving your own mark on something someone else originally made whereas composition can feel much more like conjuring art out of the ether/your mind. The infinite variations on a piece one can produce are still bounded by the original melody, and are vastly inferior in count/number than the variations of music that can be created "from scratch".
In any case, the parent comment author did not seem to me to have reached a level where they felt comfortable experimenting with interpretation - and may in fact not have achieved the requisite level to begin to be able to actively choose how they interpret pieces beyond "trying to be as accurate to the sheet music as possible". In contrast, if you're improvising, or composing with some kind of software, it is much more approachable to attempt to translate a random idea into music that can be listened to (to judge how close or off the mark our attempt is from our idea).
Basically you can skip the lengthy manual skill acquisition and jump right into playing around with the entire range of sounds and melodies that can be made.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I also understand that the "skip" you refer to probably is fun for people that don't have traditional musical experience. That's fine. However, anyone who thinks that typing start & stop into a terminal or text editor to trigger loops is MORE CREATIVE than playing a musical instrument is wrong.
