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108 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
108 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1775
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Title: HPR1775: Sonic Pi
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1775/hpr1775.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:07:15
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---
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This is HPR episode 1775 entitled Sonic Pie.
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It is hosted by Steam Vehicle and is about 11 minutes long.
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The summer is a short-remew on Sonic Pie and programming the HPR theme.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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That's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hi, I'm Steve Vehicle and this is my HPR episode about Sonic Pie.
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I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 2 to play with.
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I installed the Raspberry OS onto an SD card.
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I had a bit of a challenge getting online as the BT router doesn't want to play with
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with the Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi.
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It also fails to connect with a friend's MacBook Pro, so I'm sure it's the router that's
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a fault.
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And the Ethernet via the mains gadget didn't work either.
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Unfortunately, there's no HDMI monitor to hand under the stairs where the Ethernet
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is available, so I was limited to offline use for my Raspberry Pi.
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Fortunately, you get the pre-packaged educational programming software, Scratch and Sonic Pie.
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So there are toys to play with without going online.
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I'd seen Scratch before, but I'd never come across Sonic Pie.
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Sonic Pie is a music program, but it's different to any that I've seen before.
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It's a procedural programming language for making a manipulating music.
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Despite its primary purpose, being a simple way to introduce programming concepts to children,
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the underlying capabilities of the Sonic Pie language are really sophisticated.
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It has constructs that allow for looping, manipulation of samples, the ability to build
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sounds from primitive oscillators with attack, decay, sustain, release, envelope shaping,
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and complementary to that, it also allows conventional musical constructs such as sequencing
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of individual notes, chords, scales and arpeggios.
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When you list its capabilities, you might expect learning to use the Sonic Pie would be
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quite a daunting task, but it's not.
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Sonic Pie has been designed to educate children about programming, and it comes with a simple
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tutorial and some inspiring examples, along with relatively comprehensive documentation
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for the language, samples and oscillators.
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On a single screen, there are eight tabbed workspaces where music scripts can be written, a runtime
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viewer showing the actions being taken by your running program or programs, and the information
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pain, where tutorials or documentation can be viewed whilst programming.
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Some Aaron, who wrote Sonic Pie, is one of a community of live performers of music programming.
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Sonic Pie allows for live looping, where the programs changed on the fly and re-envoked
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with new code to move the performance on.
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There are mechanisms to create threads that run separately, but can be synchronised with
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each other.
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There's the ability to use random numbers to add variability into your program.
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A nice touch here is that the random number generator seed is always the same, so a program
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will perform repeatedly in a consistent manner.
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Some has managed to orchestrate, no pun intended, a swath of complex libraries, and optimise
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the coding of Sonic Pie in such a way that it's possible to produce a sophisticated multi-layered
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soundscape with the relatively meager resources of the Raspberry Pi and a few lines of code.
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I've never learned to play, I've never played a musical instrument, but after a couple
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of hours with Sonic Pie, a sheet of music, and a giff image I found listing the names
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of the notes in a treble clef, I have a program to play the tune to Flanders and Swans
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Hippopotamus song, a task I originally achieved back in the early 1980s on an Atari 400.
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This is not a very sophisticated rendition, and sort of misses the point of the looping
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capabilities of Sonic Pie, but it made me smile.
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So I thought I might take things a step further and try something a little bit more ambitious,
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the HPR theme.
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Not being a musician, I can't tell what note is being played by listing alone, all the
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timing for that matter, and there was no sheet music to hand.
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I managed to hack around this by playing the accordion version of the Outtrace theme
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from the HPR website on my laptop with a guitar tuner program on my Android phone displaying
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the pitch.
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To get the basic two note timings down, I used this setup, and listened to it many times
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at half speed, quarter speed, and also listened to the main theme version in VLC as well.
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Finally, I used Audacity to listen to portions of the tune repeatedly by selecting sections
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and hitting the space bar to replay.
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After a few hours of this, I'd hacked out a version of the tune into a program.
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This was still just sequential notes and sounded very flat and mechanical.
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The default sound is a beep, I changed the voice to a sawtooth waveform which sounds
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more like a brass instrument.
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For the last few bars, I changed to an alternate voice to give a richer sound, then changed
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the final notes to chords to build up the sound.
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On the main theme, there's a light, percussive, urgent background beat, so in another workspace,
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I put together a loop to do this.
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And again, it took me a non-musician some time to get anything that sounded ok.
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Once I had percussive loop, I added it to the main program in the first workspace, setting
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up the loop in a separate thread so it would play simultaneously with the tune.
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There are also a couple of drum beats to introduce the main theme, so again in a separate
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workspace, I played around with sample drum sounds and timing to get something I was happy
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with, and then inserted it into the main program.
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For any Raspberry Pi owners or Apple Mac owners, that being the only other platform the apps
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currently packaged for, I've added my two programs to the show notes.
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I'm not sure that we're allowed to perform the hippopotamus song on a Creative Commons
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podcast, so I'll not play it here.
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Instead, to show what's possible when somebody talented programs with Sonic Pi, I'll play
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back a piece from the Sonic Pi demos.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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That was Shuffleit by Sam Aaron, that was just 41 lines of code, and I think for such a
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small amount of code, that's an impressive soundscape.
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The HPR Outro is Creative Commons compatible, so I'm going to end this episode with a result
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of my less talented music endeavors, again, I'd refer you to the show notes for this listing
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and I'd ask you to take it and hack on it, make it into something better, and yes,
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make an episode about it.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
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We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out
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how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the
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infonomican computer club, and it's part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
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If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on
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the website or record a follow-up episode yourself, unless otherwise stated, today's show
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is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a live 3.0 license.
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