sonic pi - sam aaron
This video is a really good background and context to the amazing work Sam Aaron has been doing making live coding music accessible to children with his projects "Sonic Pi". Live coding is not just for male beardy computer scientists and is now I dare say it going a bit mainstream.
DJ Dave is a live coding artist from New York that travels the world performing using Sonic Pi. Sam also performs and uses Patreon to crowd fund his activities. There is an amazing live coding community around Tidal Cycles but it might be inaccessible to those without a strong programming or software background.
There is some incredible work going into his latest offering that is powered by Elixir and Phoenix live view. It allows synchronization of music and visuals and incorporates the live coding for visuals tools: hydra.
Ableton open sourced a synchronization system that Sam has incorporated and it allows many people to jam in sync with each other. The video explains all this better than I can and I recommend watching it to get a better understanding of why this is interesting. There has been a lot of effort into making it "fun" and un-intimidating.
I am personally interested in building collaborative music systems in pure data (using netpd) and potentially getting a collaborative text editing system that uses strudel. It is interesting to note that Sam personally isn't a fan of this approach because its easy to essentially destroy or mess up other peoples code.
There is lots of cool directions to take all of this technology but it all boils down to using computers & code to make live music and visuals and collaborate in a way we haven't really been able to do. Be it in the same room or people jamming around the world. I look forward to jamming with you all soon in real life or hyperspace!