I’m excited to be speaking at the December installment of the Cambridge functional programming meetup, hosted at Metail, this Thursday. I’ll be talking about making synthesized electronic music using Overtone.
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Overtone
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Overtone is an ‘Open Source toolkit for designing synthesizers and collaborating with music’. The library leverages Clojure’s power and generality for making flexible definitions of instruments, melodies and rhythms. Using code-reloading and the Clojure REPL, it provides an awesome environment for ‘live-coding’, a particularly modern form of improvisational music making!
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The Clojure JVM process doesn’t actually synthesize audio in real-time itself; instead it connects to the separate program ‘scsynth’ (the Supercollider synthesis server), which is a high performance application written in C++.
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Last summer at the Metail office-warming party we had Sam Aaron (one of the original Overtone developers, and another Cambridge resident) performing live. Check out http://meta-ex.com for some videos of other gigs he has done!
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The Talk
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In this talk, I’ll give a basic introduction to some of the features of Overtone library that I’ve had fun playing with. I’ll talk about several of the most important synthesis techniques, and demonstrate how they work (and what the results sound like!) in Overtone.
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In the second part of the talk, I’ll describe how to put the noises created in the first part together to make some music. I’ll explain a bit of music theory and show how it can be put into practice, ending with a suitably festive demo!
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The Speaker
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I’m a Clojure programmer working at Metail in the data engineering team. I’ve always been fascinated by music: I have significantly more years experience as a choral singer than as a programmer! Currently I sing tenor with Selwyn College Chapel Choir.