This Week’s Program: Nov 2 - Nov 6

Back on the _.chain(gang). This week, I started a new project.

sonic-sketches: ca99b06a335d204c57b364e2c4420285bd7a4110

In the README for my new repository, I lay out what I hope to accomplish. I’ve been fascinated with Clojure for some time. Apart from a small toy project for work, I haven’t really explored the entirety of the language or ecosystem. I realize after writing that sentence that “entirety” is real big. I haven’t explored enough of Clojure to my liking. No Clojure project is as fascinating to me as Overtone.

Overtone is “an open source audio environment designed to explore new musical ideas…” which sounds super rad and when you see it demonstrated is even more rad. I’m not a musician, but um I own a MIDI Controller (purchased when I attempted to pretend to try to become a musician) so. I had toyed with Overtone a little bit in the past. Just enough to make some blips and bloops. Just the idea of writing code to produce sound is thrilling to me.

This week I set out to take more meaningful steps in exploring Clojure’s ecosystem through the lens of Overtone. Along the way I hope to pick up some deeper understanding of Leiningen, Clojure’s project automation and configuration tool, and become more productive in CIDER, the Clojure development environment for Emacs. And, it goes without saying, I hope to make some phat beats.

I also really like the idea of code studies. I have some idea for an Overtone project that is larger in scope, but I want to sketch out ideas and experiment. The same way that an artist would sketch out studies for a greater piece. Michael Fogus talks about code painting and I think that kind of work is invaluable. It’s also a great way to reinforce the streak. I tend to get hung up on some kind of large, grandiose idea of a project. I freeze there when I should be embarking on learning and exploration phases.

sonic-sketches: cb161a3acd950a7582e57ffaf857a79569ca033a

Here’s the first sketch, just using one of Overtone’s built-in examples. Overtone is largely designed as a tool for live coding. Most of the examples and demonstrations show off Overtone’s facilities within a REPL or Emacs. Finding out how to bake something into an application is the challenge I’m interested in.

Presently, I’m struggling with making this a better behaved command line utility. I’ve taken simple POSIX signal handling for granted it seems. This weekend I hope to brush up on my Clojure reading, and get a better understanding of how the JVM can be a better Unix citizen. Less trivial examples to come next week, hopefully.

Until then,
- Mark