Wish there were more resources and conversation about creative coding not requiring equipment ~

[zaneschaffer]

Yes, i know this is a monome forum and monome creates and sells equiptment, but over the years i feel like this community has started to go past just talking about monome gear (the m4l thread, sound installation threads)

As someone who doesn’t have access to equipment but is learning more so how to craft sound art installations and create electroacoustic and digital instruments - i wish there were more topics and discussions revolving around stuff like chucK or supercollider or maxmsp or sonicpi etc etc etc

if there is a different forum or website more suited to these discussions i am all ears as well!

I guess this post could equally fit into the questions category just searching for more community based resources revolving around creative coding both in audio and visual realms.

as always, hope you’re all staying safe and washing them fingers and thumbs

[glia]

hope this doesn’t seem targeted at you in a confrontational way but…it’s not meant to be “monome” forum really

from the moment they closed their forum and launched lines, the intent was to encompass more than monome tech (and, really, more than tech at all)

still…there is an unavoidable overlap between folks who love code, diy electronics, computer music and synthesis in all forms

i say this because pretty much anywhere you go online to discuss these things you’ll notice conversation skew toward gear and specific devices used as dev platforms or pieces in an artists’ array of tools

this can’t really be blamed on anybody

---

@zaneschaffer

supercollider or maxmsp

have you had time to search the forum? search isn’t perfect but these are two of the most discussed topics in the community

i’d also recommend checking the Process category

[andrew]

hiii @zaneschaffer - I share your sentiment but I think there’s just enough of us here to make such convos happen

I want to start a kind-of max for live centered livestream soon - I think we’re in different parts of the world but we should sync to make sure you can tune in if you want !

[zaneschaffer]

not taking in a bad way at all! this is what i was sort of referencing when saying it really encompasses a lot more than just monome or even just gear in general… and yeah i call that the ‘gearslutz’ effect, seems to be persistent among most music forums / online communities i’ve been a part of!

Closest i’ve found to what i’m looking for i guess is r/livecoding and some of the sister subreddits to that ~

Definitely not trying to blame people for talking about their gear though! There is a loooooooad of cool gear out there and almost infinite conversations to be had about such ~ yet as someone who has always been a nomadically traveling musician who never has had much of an appetite for gear, sometimes it feels lonely out there

@glia

have you had time to search the forum? search isn’t perfect but these are two of the most discussed topics in the community

there are multiple threads too

Definitely! I’ve gotten heaps of resources from this forum regarding those, especially from speak of the devil @andrew

[zaneschaffer]

@andrew

I want to start a kind-of max for live centered livestream soon - I think we’re in different parts of the world but we should sync to make sure you can tune in if you want !

That sounds lovely! I recently moved back to LA from croatia because of the whole pandemic thing so we should be fairly synced up now -

I like the idea of live streaming and working together with people live, it brings me back to the feeling of being in classrooms, learning through collaboration and also through peer review !

For instance some friends and I are doing a live streamed run through on learning python for Touch Designer tomorrow

Would love to support and be involved in more of this sort of collaborative efforts

PS. hope this wasn’t taken as a diss to the community or saying that it doesn’t feel like “we’re welcome here” or anything, if anything just trying to corral likeminded people together !!

[glia]

my first thought when reading the OP was simple: if you wanna have conversations about creative use of code you are definitely in the right place

only other place might be slack and twitter discussion for livecode communities
like @yaxu’s tidalcycles

[zaneschaffer]

apologize that it came off that way!

simply wanted to start a sort of discussion on this topic and different ways to proactively collaborate (outside of the couple persistent language based threads that exist on here) and wasn’t sure how to approach it, maybe i came at it the wrong way ~

[glia]

@zebra

we put work into systems like norns in an effort to make creative coding more accessible. (without such systems/constraints, creative coding tends to be idiosyncratic and harder to share/collaborate.

btw this is as good an opportunity as any to acknowledge and thank you (and others involved) for the ongoing commitment to this type of education

comparing aleph to norns i feel like the purpose was similar and you put even more thought into how people like me could be encouraged to build our own tools…which is empowering

i’m also aware that i could make majority of these apps for free with my computer if i take enough time

the convos you had with @andrew about porting one of the best features of a hardware device to their software platform of choice remains one of my favourite things to ever happen on lines

[ht73]

This took a strange turn —I didn’t read this as a criticism of the forum, inasmuch as an expression of worry about decline of interest in creative coding in general, at least compared with how things were say 20 years ago. Such environments are around, of course, and efforts like Orca which take embodiment to a new level are important and continuing evolutionary steps. But the radically utopian dimension of the computer seems to have faded, not just in music but in all areas of culture and there are fairly obvious reasons for this. Also in danger of being forgotten in the Eurorack age are the radically antihumanist approaches of people like Gottfried Michael Koenig, who pursued a rigorous computational structuring of all levels of composition and sound material, down to the most basic. So I think it’s legitimate to inquire about the status of creative coding, “computer music” etc. and ask what if anything this all means in 2020, or going forward. The forum obviously has done nothing ‘wrong’ here, the Orca, Segmod and some of the past live coding threads are all positive testaments to that! Still… there seems a tension or issue with music “in general” that seems worthy of discussion.

[qwoned]

@ht73

danger of being forgotten in the Eurorack age are the radically antihumanist approaches of people like Gottfried Michael Koenig, who pursued a rigorous computational structuring of all levels of composition and sound material, down to the most basic

not by me!!

[PaulBatchelor]

@zaneschaffer

i wish there were more topics and discussions revolving around stuff like chucK or supercollider or maxmsp or sonicpi etc etc etc

For specific languages, have you checked out the mailing lists? They tend to be pretty fruitful, and they still have their use. Back in my Csound days, I religiously read the Csound mailing list. Last I checked, it’s still thriving. I’m also subscribed to the FAUST, ChucK, and PD mailing lists.

Perhaps the reason why you don’t see more threads here about specific musical languages is because it’s hard to carry on a meaningful conversation about them, which is what the lines format is built for. Without something more specific, it’s really hard to push past the basic question-answer format you find in mailing lists (ex: “why is my code not working?” or “how can I do this in this language?”). There’s no discussion there.

Creative Coding has the same issue of being too general, as it is a blanket term that encompasses way too many things.

[zaneschaffer]

mailing lists are fun! i’m in the faust one and yeah i agree to an extent, a lot of the fausts mail i recieve is ‘why isnt x working’ or ‘how i solved this problem’ and such. maybe also online forums aren’t the best medium for this sort of discussion!

I’m in a discord focused on learning python right now and the specificity of it as well as the rapid feeling of satisfaction and response of an irc make it a really nice experience for having both meaningful talks about the usage of a language as well as having a seperate channel devoted to everyones beginner hurdles in learning.

Does anyone know of a live coding and or audio coding discord?

Maybe i shall i make one regardless

[faded]

There’s lots of forums dedicated to live coding and to ‘creative coding’ though they tend to be based around specific tools. There is a Discourse forum for Processing and p5js for example.

[faded]

heres just a few I’m part of:

Processing / p5.js forum discourse.processing.org

OpenFrameworks discourse forum https://forum.openframeworks.cc/categories

TidalCycles livecoding community discourse https://forum.toplap.org/c/communities/tidalcycles

[sandettie]

I’m just grateful for a place to keep refreshing for discussion of synthesis and electroacoustic/acousmatic practices that isn’t…several other sites. I really appreciate the voices and moderation practices here. I say that as someone who delves equally in Max/Msp and hardware. Thank you all.