Kodsnack 723 - Bach and Beethoven and the dots and the lines, with Sam Aaron
2026-10-06 05:26
Fredrik talks to Sam Aaron about Sonic pi - the tool for learning, coding, and performing music. Whe discuss where it stated but more importantly how it has evolved during the past year - coming to the web and gaining lots of performance and features in the process.
Sam also discusses how to build reliable things when working on an indisde-out bottle ship, blindfolded and with a gaslighting agent as your help.
Recorded during the excellent Goatmire Elixir 2026 conference.
Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!
Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.
If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.
Links
- Sam
- Support Sam on Patreon!
- Goatmire
- Sonic pi
- Kristoffer
- Tau5
- Sam’s talk last year
- Elixir
- Lua
- Guy Brown at University of Sheffield
- Bleep - the synth Sam built with Guy
- Supercollider
- James MaCartney
- Audio worklet
- Cmake
- Web audio
- Gaslighting
- Open sound control
- Ring buffer
- The Supersonic demo with lots of observability
- Sam’s PhD - A domain specific language for dynamic interest management within virtual environments
- Western musical notation
- Bach
- Beethoven
- Aphex twin
- Juce - open framework for audio stuff
- DSP
- Supersonic
- Hard real time
- Rust
- OTP - essentially Erlang’s standard library
- University of Cambridge
- Cambridge festival
- Alan Blackwell - Sam’s PhD supervisor
- Support Kodsnack on Ko-fi
- QT
- Live loops in Sonic pi
- Overtone
- Clojure
- Jeff Rose
- Jonathan Graham
- Meta-ex - Sam and Jonathan’s former band
- Emacs
- Raspberry pi
- Raspberry pi foundation
- Ruby
- mruby - Ruby for embedded systems
- ESP32 - chip that Sonic pi, also, runs on
- Evan Czaplicki - the creator of Elm - was a guest in episode 604
- Rick Hickey
- Hammock driven development
Titles
- Vaporware
- Research-led
- Live-coding music systems
- Missing the important part
- A special kind of worker
- It knew I wanted a synthesizer
- Inside-out ship in a bottle
- A lying, gaslighting system
- Ticks with the audio hardware
- On the tick
- Tons of observability
- Bach and Beethoven and the dots and the lines
- Notate your score
- Notate Aphex twin
- A better supercollider
- You’re the thinker
- How slow am I prepared to go?
- The creative potential of programming