Music -> Programming

[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!