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Today, I learned...
Today, I learned...
November, 2022
November, 2022
TEDxManchester / TEDxNewcastle
TEDxManchester / TEDxNewcastle
Programming as Performance with Sam Aaron
Programming as Performance with Sam Aaron
TEDxManchester on March 30th, 2016 and TEDxNewcastle on July 22nd, 2015.
About Sam Aaron
About Sam Aaron
Dr. Sam Aaron is a Research Associate at Wolfson College and in the Digital Technology Group at the Computer Laboratory, part of the University of Cambridge. He is the founder and creator of Sonic Pi, a music live coding environment.
Dr. Sam Aaron is a live coder, who strongly believes in the importance of emphasizing, exploring and celebrating creativity within all aspects of programming. He believes the combination of computer technology with arts is essential for the development of well-researched, creative, innovative and practical ideas in tech.
In addition to Sonic Pi, he is also the lead developer on a suite of other open source tools: Overtone, a collaborative programmable music environment; Quil, an enhanced Clojure version of the visual language Processing; Emacs Live, a curated suite of Emacs tools, placing strong emphasis on live feedback and visual cues.
Why learn code?
Why learn code?
Dr. Sam Aaron's presentation at both events is mostly the same. The focus in his presentation relates to how computer science and programming is treated in relation to education, as well as, by society at large.
While computer science is an employable skill, treating it only as such is a mistake. Instead, he argues that we should present it another medium to express ourselves. We all learn to read and write in our native language, even though the vast majority of us will not become writers or editors- and yet we don't see this learning as a waste of time. We understand it's a tool that we can use to express ourselves and to entertain ourselves- and we should present programming in the same light.
Sonic Pi
Sonic Pi
Dr. Sam Aaron's has spent several years working on the application Sonic Pi. Sonic Pi is an environment for creating music through code. This software was developed specifically to have a low barrier of entry, and even with just a few basic lines of code, someone can start creating music.
The coding environment makes use of code interpretation, instead of compilation. This allowed the software to allow the programmer to modify the code while the program is still running. When utilizing control structures like loops, the programmer can modify the loop while it is running, and when it runs through the loop again, it will apply the new changes. These modifications can change things like pitch, effects, tempo, etc.
The Sonic Pi Language
The Sonic Pi Language
The Sonic Pi language is built on top of Ruby, and as such has similarities to it. The Sonic Pi language, and tutorials to start learning how to use the environment focus on a few simple function calls. Sam Aaron then fairly quickly jumps into iteration using loop structures.
In these videos, selection and more advanced control structures weren't included, but they're likely in some tutorials available elsewhere. I'll continue looking more into Sam Aaron and his work more in the future.
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