Bytes & Beats

Computers and software are intertwined with making music. Modern music would sound very different without synthesisers, samples and software sequencers. This time at Codestar Night, we want to explore some less obvious applications for software in music. We have two spectacular speakers, both developers and one of them a musician.

Be prepared for smart scripts for music notation and live coding to create real-time music!

# Tidal by Alex McClean

Alex has been making music with Haskell for many years, mainly with his free/open source environment TidalCycles (or Tidal for short; http://tidalcycles.org). He makes music by live coding with Tidal, most often at 'algoraves', where people dance to algorithmic music. Tidal applies pure functional reactive programming principles to represent musical pattern, providing a library of combinators for creating sequences and transforming them in strange ways.

Alex will introduce and demonstrate Tidal, and also talk a little about his research work in weaving, where he uses Haskell to explore textile patterns rather than musical ones.

# Just Code It! by Hamza Haiken

You want to code. Good. Now you need an idea. This talk is about inspiration: we'll find something to code, code it together and hopefully learn something along the way. On the menu today: coding a physical music box with punch cards! This will involve setting up a modern Python project, and learning about CLIs, basic music theory, some MIDI, and a bit of drawing. There will even be some types and a dash of poetry.

Hamza is a backend developer at Codestar who likes to code wacky things and loves terminals, about which he gave talks at Devoxx and Code & Comedy.

# Program
22 August 2019
17:30 Doors open and registration
18:00 Food
18:30 Talk 1
19:30 Break
20:00 Talk 2
21:00 Drinks