OSCON 2014 Theme Song - Andrew Sorensen's Live Coding Keynote

Andrew Sorensen live-coding at OSCON 2014

Keynote

Shortly after Andrew Sorensen began the performance segment of his keynote at OSCON 2014, the #oscon Twitter topic began erupting with posts about the live coding session. Comments, retweets, and additional links persisted for that day and the next. In short, Andrew was a hit :-)

My first encounter with Andrew's work was a few years ago when I was getting back into Lisp. I was playing with generative music with Overtone (and then, a bit later, experimenting with SuperCollider, Hy, and Twisted) and came across his piece A Study in Keith. You might want to take a break from reading this port and watch that now ...

When Andrew started up his presentation, I didn't immediately recognize him. In fact, when the code was displayed on the big screens, I assumed it was Clojure until I looked closely and saw he was using (define ...) and not (defun ...).  This seemed very familiar, and then I remembered Impromptu, which ultimately lead to my discovery of Extempore (see more links below) and the realization that this is what Andrew was using to live code.

At the end of the performance a bunch of us jumped up and gave a standing ovation. (In fact, you can hear me yell out "YEAH" at the end of his presentation when he says "And there we go."). It was quite a show. It seemed that OSCON 2014 had been given a theme song. The next step was getting the source code ...

Andrew's gist (Dark Github Theme)

Sharing the Code

Andrew gave a presentation on Extempore in the ballroom right after the keynote. This too was fantastic and resulted in much tweeting.

Afterwards a bunch of us went up front and chatted with him, enthusing about his work, the recent presentation, the keynote, and his previously published pieces.

I had Andrew's ear for a moment, and asked him if he was interested in sharing his keynote source -- there had been several requests for it on Twitter (that also got retweeted and/or favourited). Without hesitation, he gave an enthusiastic "yes" and we were off and running for the lounge where we could sit down to create a gist (and grab a cappuccino!). The availability of the source was announced immediately, to the delight of many.


Setting Up Extempore

Sublime Text 3 connected to Extempore

Later that night in my hotel room, I had time to download and run Extempore ... and discovered that I couldn't actually play the keynote code, since there was some implicit setup I was missing. However, after some digging around on the docs site and the mail list, music was pouring forth from my laptop -- to my great joy :-D

To ensure anyone else who is not familiar with Extempore can also have this pleasure, I've put together the all the prerequisites and setup necessary in a forked gist, in multiple parts. I will go through those in this blog post. Also: all of my testing and live coding was done using Ben Swift's Extempore Sublime Text plugin.

The first step is getting all the dependencies. You'll want to start the downloads right away, since they are large (the sample files are compressed .wavs). While that's going on, you can install Extempore using Homebrew (this worked for me on Mac OS X with no additional tweaking/configuration necessary):

With Extempore running, let's do some setup. We're going to need to:

• load some libraries (this takes a while for them to compile),
• define some samples, and then
• define some musical note aliases for convenience (and visual clarity).

The easiest way to use the files below is to clone the gist repo and load them up in Sublime Text, executing blocks of text by hi-lighting them, and then pressing ^x^x.

Here is the file for the fist two bullets mentioned above:

You will need to edit this file to point to the locations where your samples were downloaded. Also,

at the very end there are some lines of code you can execute to make sure that your samples are working.

Now let's define the note aliases. You can just hi-light the entire contents of this file in Sublime Text and then ^x^x:

At this point, we're ready to play!


Playing the Music

To get started on the music, open up the fourth file from the clone of the gist and ^x^x the root, scale, and left-hand-notes-* constants.

Here is the evolution of the left hand part:
Go ahead and start that first one playing (^x^x the definition as well as the call). Wait for a bit, and then execute the next one, etc. Once you've started playing the final left hand form, you can switch to the wider range of notes defined/updated at the bottom.

Next, you'll want to bring in the right hand ... then bassline ... then the higher fmsynth sparkles for the right hand:

Then you'll increase the energy with the drum section:

Finally, you'll bring it to the climax, and then start the gentle fade out:

A slightly modified code listing for the final keynote form is here:


Variation on a Theme

I have recorded a variation of Andrew's keynote based on the code above, for your listening pleasure :-) You can listen to it in your browser or download it.

This version plays part of the left hand piano an octave lower. There's a tiny bit of clipping in places, and I accidentally jazzed it up (and for too long!) with a hi-hat change in the middle. There are also some awkward transitions and volume oddities. However, these should be inspiration for you to make your own variation of the OSCON 2014 Theme Song :-)

The "script" used for the recording can found here.


Links of Note

Some of these were mentioned above, some haven't been. All relate to Extempore :-)

• A Study in Keith.
• The Disklavier Sessions - 2013
• Andrew on Github: https://github.com/digego
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/digego
• Extempore:
• Site: http://extempore.moso.com.au/
• Docs: http://benswift.me/extempore-docs/index.html
• Mail list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/extemporelang
• Source code: https://github.com/digego/extempore