Sam Aaron
@samaaron
Live Coding Artist. Creator of Sonic Pi & Tau5, programmer, educator, musician, PhD, Sam 'transcends the present' - Rolling Stone. he/him bookings@sonic-pi.net
In Sonic Pi v5 the documentation for each synth is an actual playable synth. Use the qwerty keys to trigger the notes and play with the control knobs like a standard synth - it then generates the code for you. Sonic Pi v5 RC1 is now freely available to download: www.patreon.com/samaaron/pos...
Sonic Pi v5 now opens up with a new Quickstart Card system. This gets people up and running much faster and more joyfully than a long wordy tutorial. You can play the cards directly or drag them into the editor to use the snippet in your own composition.
Sonic Pi now supports game controllers. Connect a spare Xbox controller just like a MIDI controller and jam away. Use your finely honed Fortnite skills to express yourself through music! Available next week as an exclusive pre-release for Patreon supporters in v5 Beta 4. patreon.com/samaaron
Sonic Pi now has the ability to sync bpm with external MIDI clocks. Up to 8 simultaneous MIDI clocks are supported - so you could drive multiple threads at different BPMs simultaneously via different clocks. Coming in v5 Beta 4 in a week or so...
Simmering in the background - SuperSonic Embedded. I've got it running on a ESP32-S3.
Working on a new shortcut editor for Sonic Pi. Patreon supporters will get exclusive access to the pre-release beta very soon...
I'm making good progress integrating Ableton Link Audio streams into Sonic Pi. Now you can receive link streams in addition to sending the main stereo out. I think this is a really powerful feature - especially if we see wider adoption of Link Audio in other audio software.
SuperSonic's new Link Audio output stream seems too good to be true. It just works. It even gracefully handled a network card switch. With an ethernet connection you can get the latency really low. Nice work Ableton. This will feature in Sonic Pi v5 Beta 3 - available to Patreon supporters soon.
I'm working on adding full Ableton Link v4 support to SuperSonic. This includes support for Link Audio - enabling you to effortlessly stream audio between different machines on your local network. Today I successfully streamed sound from a modified Sonic Pi on my Mac to Ableton Live on my PC.
Rumour has it that Patreon supporters now have access to a private beta of v5 of Sonic Pi - powered by SuperSonic. patreon.com/samaaron
I just pushed v0.35 of SuperSonic - my port of SuperCollider's powerful synthesis engine scsynth to the web as an AudioWorklet. This comes with a lot of performance improvements, improved bundler compatibility and much polish to the fun example. Take it for a spin: sonic-pi.net/supersonic/d...
SuperSonic now exposes the scsynth node tree for fast reading from JS. This does not require a full OSC round-trip like /g_queryTree (which is also supported for legacy use cases). Instead it’s automatically written to the SharedArrayBuffer so visualisers can read it at 60fps without issue.
Absolutely loving the new album “Instant Holograms on Metal Film” by @stereolabgroop.bsky.social The music is so on point and the lyrics movingly poignant. Highly recommended!
SuperSonic - my port of SuperCollider’s powerful synthesis engine scsynth now has improved metrics - opening up a window to the internals. Play with the demo and see for yourself! sonic-pi.net/supersonic/d...
I updated the SuperSonic example to include synths, samples and FX and a fun playful interface. SuperSonic is my port of SuperCollider’s extremely powerful scsynth engine to Web AudioWorklets so it can run in the browser. Play with it here: sonic-pi.net/supersonic/d...
I've been busy hacking away on Tau5 - I'm still working hard laying the best foundations I can. If you'd like to help me continue to work hard at full speed, please do consider supporting me on Patreon. Every small donation helps more than you realise towards sustainability. patreon.com/samaaron
Tau5 will be a creative coding native/web platform for secure, event-driven, concurrent, hot-swappable, deterministic & precisely-timed distributed computation. Features include a native GUI, remote browser UI, LAN discovery/mesh, central server global sync & a sandboxed local MCP for AI. tau5.live
Experimenting with a fun loading overlay for Tau5 using gratuitous GLSL shaders :-)
Tau5 just got vastly improved server debugging with a new Elixir console to the server and a powerful inspection dashboard.
Tau5 - now with web developer tools (the app is essentially a custom browser connected to an internal web server running on the BEAM VM). The debug pane now lets you see what the BEAM is doing and also to see what the Chromium browser is doing. All in one compact view.
Just added a new dev log console for observing the BEAM VM running in the background. The BEAM is Tau5’s brain and is where all the magic happens. The Tau5 GUI is essentially a custom simplified browser.
