This Week’s Program: Feb 8 - Feb 12

Another heads-down, focused week; which are the best weeks. This newsletter suffers when I have really good coding weeks because my mind is focused there and not on writing effusive, witty prose.

I’m slowly (slowly) making my way through a great book: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, or just 10 PRINT for short. It’s a dense, somewhat academic, fascinating examination of this BASIC one-liner as a, as Amazon says:

as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.

I’ve been inspired by it in a lot of ways, and have begun posting explorations on its themes using Processing to my Instagram account. Follow me there to see my progress with generative art and creative coding. Throughout the coming weeks I’ll discuss more of that in this Tinyletter. For now it feels very ad hoc and experimental.

The other thing that 10 PRINT has inspired, along with some of what I’m doing in sonic-sketches, is a lot of random thoughts. I mean I’m thinking a lot about Randomness as a theme in computers. Some great conferences are coming up, and I’ve drafted up an abstract I intend to send out to some CFP’s. I’d love your feedback on it: A Survey of Pseudorandomness. I think it could be a good talk. Reply to this email or comment on the gist with your thoughts and comments.

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At the end of last week, I pulled in the Clojure data.generators library. This week I use the binding function to bind the dynamic, stateful *rnd* var to a seed (the current timestamp). There was some trial and error here in learning about how binding works. Thankfully there’s this great blog post by Chas Emerick: Be Mindful of Clojure’s binding that talks through some of the traps.

With this code, I can take the previous seed and use it to replay a previously generated sequence.

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Here’s a map of Italian words to ranges of BPM.

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Given an Italian word, generate a metronome by randomly choosing a BPM within its range.

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Here was a tricky piece of code. I wanted to randomly choose a subset of drums from the total percussion selection. Inside the overtone.inst.drum namespace is a bunch of Overtone instruments. I wanted to draw from all of those without stating exactly the instruments I needed. Thanks to the denizens of the Clojurians Slack, I found the ns-aliases function. Using this, I could wrangle out all of the percussion synths that Overtone has pre-defined.

Six seems like a good number for a drum set, I think. It sounds okay.

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Here I attach the RNG seed and the BPM to the metadata of the song when I upload it to S3. So anything that the program uploads to S3 can be reproduced locally by getting that object’s seed out of its metadata.

This is also one of my first times using Clojure’s rest parameters. That apply hash-map seems idiomatic, but I’m not sure.

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I loop the drum sequence for 8 bars. I am pleased with the drummachine API. Good job, me.

Good job you for making it to the end of this week and to the end of this newsletter. Have a happy Valentine’s Day weekend.

🎲 Mark