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What are the coolest coding + music projects out there?

Ben Halpern on November 18, 2021

Take this question any way you want, but what projects marry scripting and coding, or just music projects that lend themselves to development in any way.

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YCM Jason

Definitely not the coolest. But would love to share one of my own project that I actually live-coded at a conference as an introduction to Vue 3's composition API.

keyboard-keyboard.ycmjason.com/

It is basically a piano keyboard controlled by your computer keyboard.

See my live-coding talk here:

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Ben Halpern

Cool!

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Ben Halpern

I really want to actually try Sonic Pi, but I've never gotten to it.

I'm curious if anybody has any other projects along these lines.

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Ricardo Sueiras

I’ve done workshops with kids and it’s a great project and well worth giving it a go. There was an open source drum machine that was pretty neat, but my bookmarks are letting me down and I can’t find it. Also, I’m a sucker for SID music as the c64 was my first, and there are some cool projects out there.

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

That is a really interesting project, thanks for that one!

I have just lost my weekend to playing with audio generation it seems 🤣

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

You should check out Aiva.ai

AI generated music that you can buy the complete copyright to (which is what excites me about their pricing model, I don’t think anyone else lets you own a track outright).

They also let you download the midi file for other projects / to improve the tracks.

When their API comes online you could create a store, a radio station, who knows!

For now I think they would be useful as audio tracks for game hackathons etc.

I wrote a little about it here and you can hear some music it created:

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Kimberlee Johnson

My colleague @philmillman gave an awesome talk recently about using WebRTC (Daily) and Web Midi to remotely control some hardware for jam sessions: twitter.com/philmillman/status/146...

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Edwin

ZzFX - it's a tiny synthesizer that you control with 20 parameters and it gives you a single line of code that you can copy paste. It's fantastic for coding competitions like js13k. Of course people also create music with it. Beep boop 🤖

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catrina

This site allows you to create and share pictures of stringed chords. It is a very simple idea and so useful for those learning/practicing stringed instruments:

chordpic.com/
and here on GitLab: gitlab.com/Voellmy/chordpic

I've always liked the idea and recreating it in different technologies.

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Luca • Edited

Someome will say a gui programming language isn't real programming, but I still think max-msp and puredata are the king and the queen of such domain!

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Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli

Meet this incredible demo scene musician:

youtube.com/c/Gasmanic/videos

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Luca

Wow, didn't know Automationism... thanks, now I'll definitely have something new to mess with!

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Isaac Lyman

I got into the Web Audio API a few years ago and made Viano, a Vue.js library that lets you write songs using component markup: github.com/isaaclyman/Viano

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Jérémie Astor

Of course there's Gwion, but you may have interest in tidal-cycles itself based on super collider iirc

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Jai Sandhu