System Review: iXi lang
iXi Language
Ixi language or ixilang is a live coding musical environment designed to function as a way to code musical expressions and algorithms. It was designed by Thor Magnusson and has been maintained and updated by a core dedicated group of developers and users. Ixilang brings our focus to the emergence of coding and musical coding languages.
This is a realm that is still relatively new and relatively unexplored, while there are many people that are making music these days, very few are coding their sounds and still fewer are working on dedicated languages such as ixilang and other super collider extensions. There are dedicated followers this generative art form, and they are experiencing an interest wave of interest stemming from the recent developments of NFTs, but this is still relatively unexamined. What is my experience with ixilanauge? I like to code, I like to experiment with sound and software and hardware techniques, I enjoy the process of taking apart complex mechanisms and finding out how they work and then making them work in ways that was never intended or that makes them work differently that designed. I feel like if you share these interests than you will also find a tool like ixilanguage invaluable to your experimentation process. It will greatly inform to you whats possible and perhaps inspire you to code together some ixilang experiments or perhaps to work on supercollider and experiment with ixilang as an extensible language. The challenge I see with ixilang is the learning curve, like with any coding language, is a little bit steep. There is not much that one can do to make this less so. Definitely it helps to know how to code with several different languages, but the uniqueness of ixilang makes it something all its own.
Ultimately ixilang is a tool like any other, it matters what you want to do, and how you can think of doing it. Ixilang as a module in that process could be invaluable. I have personally found that tools like ixilang are far from elements in my production, they are the core features of the way I make music these days. If you are interested in checking out ixilang I have included some great resources to get you started below:
Resources:
http://www.ixi-audio.net/
https://github.com/thormagnusson/ixilang
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixi_lang