from Hacker News

Overtone – programmable, live music in Clojure

by elamje on 8/3/23, 4:25 PM with 13 comments

  • by iainctduncan on 8/4/23, 8:48 PM

    Just a warning for folks getting excited, I think Overtone was cool, but it's a dead project and there are lots of currently live options for doing similar things instead. Overtone has not seen work from the author since 2015 as he now focuses on Sonic Pi, his Ruby based system. And it's had very minimal activity by others in a long time.

    If you want to use something similar to Clojure, there is CL-Collider, the common lisp front end to supercollider.

    Or on a related but different tip, I am the author of Scheme for Max and Scheme for Pd, which you can use to script Max and PD with s7 Scheme. I will be doing another release this fall having now just finished my Master's thesis on it. There is also Julien Vincenot's MoZLib for CL alongside Max. Extempore is another Scheme based live coding system.

  • by 1MachineElf on 8/4/23, 4:14 PM

    Recently I watched a great presentation[0] about Overtone by Chris Ford, delivered back in 2012. It was also the first time I saw my SO interested in a programming language talk - she isn't familiar with programming, but she does have a music background.

    [0] https://youtu.be/Mfsnlbd-4xQ

  • by chaosprint on 8/4/23, 4:02 PM

    Most live coding languages relying on SuperCollider can take advantage of the client-server architecture of SC and support collaboration easily. So it's very interesting that the concept of collaboration is highlighted on Overtone website. Is it embedded in the language aspect?

    When I develop Glicol[1], I want to build a WYSIWYG style: for example commenting out a line will mute the track. But it brought some challenges to collaboration so I have to build some "consensus" mechanism on top of the Google doc style text co-editing (powered by yjs[2]).

    [1] https://glicol.org/

    [2] https://github.com/yjs/yjs

  • by foxbyte on 8/4/23, 7:06 PM

    Check out SuperCollider and Clojure for more on the tech behind Overtone. They offer great resources for audio programming and live coding!

  • by swayvil on 8/5/23, 3:09 AM

    >If setup and draw are hard working artistic gladiators, sketch is the arena in which they battle for the glory of art. However, they don't actually fight each other - they work as a team - relentlessly spilling colour all over the arena sands. The crowds roar for messy fight.

    He has the right attitude.

  • by voat on 8/4/23, 4:02 PM

    Looks pretty neat.

    Their logo is reminiscent of the old Fushia OS logo https://ms.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail:Google_Fuchsia_Logo.svg

  • by nologic01 on 8/4/23, 3:28 PM

    How does overtone compare to Tidal Cycles and are there plans to make it run in the browser (like the Strudel project)?