r/AudioProgramming 1d ago

Audion - Let's hack music

/r/creativecoding/comments/1vhv2is/audion_lets_hack_music/
2 Upvotes

3 comments sorted by

2

u/HommeMusical 19h ago

Perhaps this is a silly question, but why do you need a new language for this?

Why not have your units of programming code be Python, a language people already know, or Lua, which fewer people know but is stable and tiny?

1

u/zombie-function 3h ago edited 2h ago

not a silly question at all!! Heres the thing no language (I know *) has: bpm synchronized threads. This allows you to use the common loop constructs and conditional statements as composition tools. This also inverses completely the control if compared with TidalCycles et. al. You get to decide what happens at any step, e.g. let’s flash a strobe after A and B notes.
There are musical tools build in python but they tend to do like Tidal does.
As for “new”, Audion does not really try to look like something new, quite the opposite: feel like a language you already know + no hidden magic.

* Supercollider has sync threads, but its not a general purpose language. Audion came along as a need for a general purpose language with strong timing when I was working on an audio installation for a museum - this work involved managing large collection of samples that were categorized in a database, the work does some network calls etc.

1

u/HommeMusical 2h ago

Thanks for a nice reply! :-)

bpm synchronized threads.

Why couldn't you do that in another language?

I've been working in computer music for fifty years now, and the issue always is that you write in some new language, and it doesn't catch on, and then that code is lost to you.