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(sam aaron)
(sam aaron)
Sam Aaron — live coding DJ set (2016)
Live Coding
Sam Aaron Live Coding with Sonic Pi - TEDx Talks
Examples of live coding like this one can actually make you wonder about the future of music and its evolution thanks to digital technologies.
Put on your dancing shoes and don’t forget your laptop, see you on the dancefloor!
Moogfest 2016, Part II -- Top to bottom: 1. Sam Aaron performing using his educational live-coding software, Sonic Pi, at The Armory, Durham, NC, 19 May 2016 2 - 4. Ben Frost at The Carolina Theater, Durham, NC, 21 May 2016 5. The Orb at The Armory, Durham, NC, 21 May 2016 -- There are perks to having an especially brilliant spouse. Like, three weeks ago, five minutes after arriving at Moogfest, Durham, NC, I'm standing a few feet away from Gary Numan as he's being interviewed by DJ Lance Rock of Yo! Gabba Gabba fame, while K waits to be photographed by a dude from Rolling Stone. She's a Future Thought speaker, she's organized a panel, so we've got the hook up--artist's passes, free food and drinks, the whole deal. The passes let us slip in and out of venues with ease. Only twice do we have to wait to get in anywhere--once for Numan, once for The Orb. It's maybe an hour before I've somehow lost my phone during a lively panel discussion presented by RVNG Intl. Soon, I'm crawling around the floor, looking under tables with Heiroglyphic Being and Matt from RVNG. The phone's a pretty generic thing, so I think it's been accidentally lifted. K meets up with me after her theremin workshop, and we use hers to send a bunch of slightly panicked texts. Almost farcically, I find mine in our bag, while Larry Gus loses his mind in front of a large crowd gathered at The Pinhook. (K says I probably shouldn't tell anyone what happened. Naturally, I tell everyone.) Minimally equipped with his anarchic voice, some samplers, maybe a couple pedals, and a floor tom, LG deconstructs his songs endlessly, winds up bloodied after using his forehead as a percussion instrument. He is profound and wild. His ecstatic performance sets a high bar for the rest of the events we plan to attend throughout the weekend. Surprisingly, more then a few of them meet the standard he's set. Thursday's turns out to be a night of missed connections. We're trying to get together with the rest of the Spatial Sounds and Subhistories Crew (read: K's fellow panelists), but totally blow it. Jlin's nearly deafened K with a surprise drop, and, eventually, we give up, settle on a breakfast gathering the following morning. In the end, we manage about half the crew. Over mammoth sausage biscuits, breakfast burritos, and grits, we coordinate, resolve to meet for lunch and drinks later at artists' services. After which, we walk over to Carolina Soul Records to catch author and Spatial Sounds panelist Dave Tompkins spin the most wonderfully gross, just-plain-wrong remix of "Working in a Coal Mine." 8 o'clock creeps up, and we're working our way into The Armory to watch Kode9--aka Steve Goodman, founder of Hyperdub--and Lawrence Lek perform selections from the appropriately titled Nothing, the former's pean to absence, loss, and nothingness. Still bass heavy, but almost a delicate record by Kode9's standards, I'm surprised to find it transformed into a brutal, intensely physical experience. The music asserts its thing-ness. Through its suffocating bass, it occupies space in the room, rattles our bones, and in turn emphasizes our corporeality, our own thing-ness. This contrast between the performance and the compositions themselves--songs ostensibly about nothing (n.)--creates a riveting tension that Goodman maintains throughout the duration of the set. Lek, for his part, emphasizes this through the visuals he's created for the show: a sprawling virtual environment--the Notel--an empty monument to "fully automated luxury communism." He pilots his avatar, a drone, through cold, lonely corridors triggering events in time with the music. It's terrific, one of those things that, even in moments when what's on the screen isn't particularly interesting, is still engrossing simply because of what it is, what it represents, and what might happen next. Saturday we meet again for breakfast. Same spot, Foster’s Market, basically the same stuff. This is not a problem. The whole panel's here this time: Kristen, Dave, Steve Goodman and sound researcher / artist Toby Heys--both acting as formal representatives of AUDINT, and esteemed writer / editor James Hughes, the panel's moderator. Steve's brought Lawrence, everyone's having a nice chat, getting at the nuts and bolts of the afternoon's talk. Then, before I can really process what I'm doing, I'm booking it across Durham on the only sorta hot day of the week to catch Gwenno perform her Welsh-language, Sci-fi pop at the historic First Presbyterian Church. I arrive sweaty and a bit late, sit in pew up front. I'm expecting a full-band set-up for whatever reason, so when I see her stood alone on the alter behind a Korg and a few other bits of gear, all decked out in an evening gown, I'm pleasantly surprised. In between numbers, she's self deprecating and charming as she talks us non-Welsh-language speakers through the themes of the next sweet-sounding, dystopic tune she'll be playing from her outstanding LP, Y Dydd Olaf. She's nailing every one of them. Her voice is in fine form, and the church's acoustics complement her dreamy arrangements wonderfully--all of which seem beefier live, and those kicks, oh the kicks! Maybe a good synth kick always sounds unbelievable in a church? Anyway, the sun is pouring through the stained-glass windows, and everything sounds perfect, and for forty minutes everything seems perfect. People of all ages are dancing in the aisles, another ecstatic moment in as many days. Thirty minutes later, Kristen and her fellow panelists are getting ready to talk sound, spectres, weird science, and our secret past-future history to a full-house of engaged Moogfest attendees. They're talking stratospheric turtles, coral-obsessed booty bass progenitors, ghost currency. Q*bert swears, too. Afterwards, we're milling around, and I'm thinking that, frankly, this is the only festival of its size that I’m aware of, maybe anywhere, that places equal emphasis on expanding minds via both intellectual rigor and apocalyptic bass, and succeeds on both counts. When Moogfest talks about exploring the future, it's not happening at Grimes installations or even during most of the performances, it's happening at these panels. We're on the way to get some celebratory drinks, and I'm having a moment while listening to The Body from outside The Pinhook. The others laugh, acknowledging it as such. Eventually, the club-like venues start reaching a grim sort of asthmatic capacity, so K and I walk to the stately Carolina Theater to eat Milk Duds and watch Ben Frost from comfortable chairs in the balcony. Sat up there, we're on an airport tarmac without sound blockers, we're involved in some kind of dare, a test of auditory endurance. I have no idea what it sounds like inside the supercollider, but maybe it's this? It's heart-stoppingly beautiful, too, when I'm not worried that the bass is actually going to stop my heart. There are strobes and fog. And wolves. For a long time there are wolves. It is the loudest thing I've ever experienced. (SunnO)))? Psh.) Also one of the most transcendent and life affirming--an indelible performance. When it's all done, and the fog clears, Frost stands on the stage barefoot, and I swear he applauds us. I get up to leave and notice that I'm covered in plaster. My drink is full of it. We catch up with everyone at The Armory. The Orb is playing. Seriously, it's like watching / listening to drugs in the '90s. We stay for the whole set, hypnotized and kinda dumbfounded by the visuals, which, for better or worse, clearly haven't changed since the heyday of British rave culture, leaving just as DJ Harvey starts his three-hours of debauchery. Our ears and bodies are spent, so we and Toby head back to the hotel. Sunday, after breakfast and goodbyes, K and I are heading to meet James at a panel presented by Google. Icon-design icon Susan Kare will be discussing her career, along with Manuel Clément, Senior VR Designer at Google, and secret special guest Jimmy Hasse, Managing Graphics Editor at The Onion. The Germick Bros. of the Google Doodle team are moderating. It's goofy as hell, but wildly entertaining. Topics on the docket: sad Macs, solitaire, the efficiency of condom bitmaps, the questionable worth of VR, a fictional Biden filching throwing stars, accurate depictions of Subway sandwiches. Soon, we've parted ways with James. We’re on the freeway, on our way to some hot springs to decompress. Well, after a lengthy detour to visit Grave Digger's Graveyard. I mean, how could we skip that? We're discussing the weekend. -- All images by Bernie Brooks -- You can read Kristen’s recap here. -- Bernie Brooks is Ship’s editor-at-large and blogging guy. Emails go to here: bernie [at] shipinthewoods [dot] com
Sonic pi
Sonic Pi is an open source programming environment designed to explore and teach programming concepts through the process of creating new sounds.
Here is Sam Aaron Talking about sonic pi at campus party London