Perl coding upgrade#
Perl coding full#
Perl coding software#
Perl coding code#

In any case, the most important thing is that your code makes a musical pattern that you judge to be good.

Perl coding full#

Saying that, to take full advantage of any inspiration you have found, code needs to be written very quickly, so keen programming skills and good knowledge of Perl is of great advantage. Now, while musical Perl code doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to make sense either, you don’t have to plan on making anything that is at all readable the next day. So instead of starting with someone else’s software, why not start with nothing apart from some vague musical idea? Then sit down and start to express that idea as code. Perl hackers know that programming is a creative endeavour. This approach is often termed “Generative music.” When making music in this way, the composer is taking a step back from the music, working with the structure behind a composition rather than with the composition itself. Instead of writing a melodic sequence by hand, a Perl Musician writes a Perl script that algorithmically generates a melody. When I use the phrase Perl Music, I mean music that is generated live by Perl code. First, I’ll talk a little about writing code that generates music. I’ll introduce my live-programming environment – “” –later. This approach grew through a collaboration with Adrian Ward called “slub,” and also from a fast-growing organization called TOPLAP, the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming. If a programmer is onstage, then they should program! This may seem a little extreme, but I’m not the only one making music this way.

Perl coding software#

Over the last couple of months, I’ve moved toward writing software live, in front of an audience. I could tweak parameters and so on, but the underlying structure was dictated by my software.

However, when running my Perl scripts during a performance I grew to feel as if I wasn’t really performing – I was running software I’d written earlier, so to some extent the performance was pre-prepared.

To this end, I built a whole library of little compositional Perl scripts that I ran together to make music. I’ve had some successes, with hundreds of people dancing to my Perl, jumping about to my subroutines, whooping as I started up a new script. Very few of these musicians have chosen Perl to write their musical code, but this article hopes to encourage more Perl hackers to turn their tools to music.Ī little about myself – I’m a musician who for the last few years has used Perl as my only musical instrument. This is a diverse world, spanning and mixing all the genres you could think of, from classical cantata form to speed garage to dance hall. However, at the fringes of electronic music, you find musicians who are also programmers, writing their own software to generate their music.

Perl coding upgrade#

Here the limits of composition are defined by the creators of software, with musicians eagerly waiting for the next upgrade of their favorite music application. If music and software have so much in common, how do they commonly meet? Well, modern-day music is often composed not at a piano but at a computer. The question is, can you write improvised Perl scripts on stage? This article hopes to answer this question. Where is the comparison with code here? Well, how many times have you sat down to write some Perl without first deciding exactly how you were going to structure it? Perl is great for improvising. The rules behind improvised music – for example improvised jazz – develop during a performance, perhaps with little or no predefined plan. So a piece of composed music is like a Perl script, but let’s not forget improvised music. When you play from a musical score or run a program you are bringing instructions to life. In other words, a musical score is a kind of source code, and a musical performance is a kind of running program. Indeed, when the operation of even the dullest data-munging computer program is visualized, for example in a debugger, it does seem to be dancing around its loops and conditions – moving in patterns through time. With both I am immersed in an abstract world of animated structures, building up and breaking down many times before finally reaching a conclusion. I’ve found the experiences of dancing and programming to have a great deal in common.