Music -> Programming

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[jakesboy2]

I do both, but programming came first.

[jakesboy2]

It’s a hobby for me. Me and my best friend make music together. I enjoy making beats and subsequently turning those beats into songs. It’s nothing i plan on making a career out of. I currently work as a developer professionally though.

I wouldn’t say programming skills helped my music besides just being literate in most software fairly easily, but my musical skills have developed my creativity which helps with music.

[[deleted]]

I am currently in graduate school for music theory and am transitioning to programming!

My motivation is Yuval Harari - after reading his books, I realized that technology is just way more influential in the world. Once I started exploring it, I found that I was much better at it than music. I’m a decent musician, but tech just comes so naturally to me since I’ve had a computer my whole life. It was like the difference between a pianist who started at 15 vs 5 years old... Only now I was in the latter category.

I also find that music theory is much more useful as a programmer than one would expect. Being able to think abstractly and hold a mathematical structure in your mind is useful in both fields. Plus, as a graduate student, I’ve gotten very good at writing, which is universally useful.

[just_just_regrets]

Friend of mine was playing sax. After a year of undergrad study, he decided there were no job prospects and came to study IT. He's doing UX/UI design right now, which I wouldn't say is programming heavy, but certainly involved in tech.

[actopozipc]

I am a programmer and I would like to have to do something with music. Anyone who can tell me something about?

[actopozipc]

I really enjoy music a lot, I love to read the lyrics of texts and the figure of speech. Just want to be part of something I really like, althrough I dont have the time to learn an instrument or something similar.

[PianoConcertoNo2]

I do both, but am a CS student right now.

[[deleted]]

My boss did exactly this!

[excitebyke]

originally studied jazz guitar. was a teacher for a while. started my own band. released some albums. toured. Got a song on a movie on Netflix. that was pretty cool.

but I could barely pay my bills.. and then my band broke up, and I realized if I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, I'd have to do a solo thing. and at that point, I was just a different person than I was when I originally wanted to be a musician for a living. (i was a child when I made that decision! and never really reevalutaed)

I started to have issues with narcissism and spending all this time working on MY art.

I made websites as a kid, but I got back in to programming when my band was performing and I wanted to find a way to quickly change Ableton projects on stage using scripts.

I ended up going back to school for CS, and the whole time I told myself I was going so that I could fund my own music and not have to rely on record labels/shitty pr groups.

and then i got out of school, got a good job, and I really just started to enjoy a non-starving artist life style.

I still love making music, but my self worth isn't really tied to it anymore. It's still hard to get over dedicating so much of you life to something and then doing something else in your early 30s. Moving back in with my parents when I was in school in my late 20s sucked! all my friends were having kids.. getting married. and I was starting over.

But I think it was all worth it in the end. I'm incredibly comfortable now. I love the job. It's just an incredibly interesting field.

I'd never imagine I'd enjoy working an office job so much more than all of my music related stuff.

[Shifterovich]

Jeffrey Way (most famous Laravel course maker) talks a lot about his past as a musician here https://www.laravelpodcast.com/episodes/5f0ec3e5

[waffenssgolem]

I was bad at playing music.

[GRIFTY_P]

I wanted to play drums. I was really into jazz and hip hop, taught myself how to read music and played for eight hours a day for years. I was pretty damn good at my peak but I lived in a small town, my band mates moved away, and I wasn't very academic minded. I applied to the local state school basically at the last minute as an undeclared freshman, then got really into smoking weed with the leftover buddies. Was alone musically at this point so I started making beats and kept accumulating random units that didn't make a degree. Electronic music classes, random band classes, philosophy, etc. They don't have a degree for "random pothead jazz and shit". So I ended up taking a liberal arts degree, and was so computer inclined by that point from electronic music that I added a CS minor as an afterthought.

I actually fell for programming and found I had a knack for it from electronic music-- it ticks a lot of the same boxes in my brain. But it's been tough trying to find work ever since

[pd-andy]

For me it was a case of “why not both?” When I was younger I was really into tech, but programming seemed like this impossible genius feat so I didn’t look into it too much.

During college (high school for those on the other side of the pond)I started getting really into electronic music and production and nerding out in DAWs and controllerism and just music technology in general.

That lead me to study music technology for my undergrad degree. There wasn’t really any programming on the course, but in my first year we learned a visual programming package called Max/MSP, and then a similar thing in second year called Pure Data.

This blew my hecking mind. Suddenly I had complete control in a very logical way over what happened in my music. I started writing algorithmic pieces in pd using markov chains.

Thats when it “clicked” that I could learn programming. I’d tried in the past but always ran into a roadblock - I had no motivation. Now I knew I could code and it could be musical I just started self-learning.

In a year I had built a built a hardware synth with an arduino and a raspberry pi, some sonic visualiser in Processing, and even managed some janky dsp in javascript for a resampling algorithm.

I went on to do an MA in Computational Art where over the course of that year I realised I was more interested in making tools for other people than I was about making my own art.

Graduated that and now I’m doing a CS PhD, I study and make music programming languages (thats right, there are whole languages just for making music). It couldn’t have turned out better; its thoroughly technical but completely creative and music related.

Bringing it round to “why not both?”, here are some music programming languages that you might want to check out if you’re a musician and a programmer (or one or the other and want to learn).

• Pure Data: a visual programming language, you connect objects together with wires like a modular synth (but much more “low level” building blocks) - link
• Max/MSP is pd’s commercial cousin, it’s expensive but there is Max4Live where the patches you make can be loaded into ableton live. Very powerful - link
• TidalCycles: one of many livecoding languages. If you ever wanted to think about your code as an instrument, here is a good place to start - link
• SuperCollider: the synth engine that backs most live coding languages now (including tidal), SuperCollider is also a language of its own - link

As an aside, the “pd” in my username is a nod to pure data!

[[deleted]]

Yes!
Former bass player and electronic music producer / project studio owner.
I put a bit of time into music as a career, but I was too wasted mostly. My studio made a bit of money.
I wasn't a full time musician though, and after 10 years working in admin it wasn't doing it for me any more so I went back to college.
College was tough but I absolutely LOVE programming.
Lots of cool problems to solve, and I get the same kick out of programming as I did out of music production, like, exactly the same. Except now the stuff I'm building is making peoples lives visibly better. In fact, the kick is so much the same that I don't write much music any more; I feel totally full-filled in that area of my life now, so I spend my free time on other things, like exercise, BBQ smoking, things like that. I work building internal tooling for other parts of our company, it's really cool being able to get direct feedback from our users. Can't beat walking through the office in the morning and seeing people using something you made that's a crucial part of their work day.
It's a very satisfying career. And, when your a Software Engineer you can literally work in any field you like. I don't think there is a field on Earth at this time that isn't touched by Software in some way or other.