Episode 5: Repeats & Loops

The code for this episode is available here. Loops are such an essential part of programming that I knew I’d have to make an episode on them at some point. A natural musical analogue is musical repeats, so the whole episode came fairly naturally! I thought it’d be fun to have some beats to accompany the piano, so I used SuperCollider for that. That proved to be the most challenging part of the episode, as getting the timing right was really hard.

July 20, 2021 Read
Episode 4: Live Coding & Jazz

The code for this episode is available here. I had a different idea for the fourth episode, but then I saw John McLaughlin’s tweet about International Jazz day, and decided to do something for that instead. Obviously I’d talk about Jazz in the musical section, but it wasn’t clear yet what part of Jazz I’d talk about. I spoke to a few people and it seemed like a good idea would be to talk about improvisation, and how jazz musicians do it; in particular, I’m hoping this helps people who don’t “get” jazz to understand what we’re doing when we play it, and that we’re not just playing random notes!

April 28, 2021 Read
Episode 3: Leitmotifs & Variables

The code for this episode is available here. I had it in my head that the third episode would talk about variables in the section about Computer Science. Originally I thought the musical would be about chords, but it didn’t quite fit well with variables. Then I thought about key signatures, thinking that these are kind of like variables in the sense that you can shift any song into different pitches just by changing key signatures; but again, I wasn’t very content with the connection.

March 11, 2021 Read
Episode 2: Bits & Semitones

The code for this episode is available here. The idea for doing something with bits seemed kind of natural to me as a second episode. After covering what “computation” is, why not cover what computers actually “see” when they run computations? Given that bits are what makes up everything inside a computer’s software, I wanted a musical topic that was inside every type of music (at least in Western music).

February 7, 2021 Read
Episode 1: Musical Notes & Computation

The code for this episode is available here. I originally thought this channel would be a kind of educational channel, where people could learn about both music and computer science in a fun and informal way. I tweeted asking for suggestions for what to cover first on the CS side, and Kory Mathewson’s response was my favourite. On the music side, it was kind of a train-of-thought process. The first thing that came to mind when thinking about the first thing you might learn in music theory was musical notes themselves.

January 28, 2021 Read
Introducing MUSICODE

A musical ode to musical code. Subscribe to the YouTube channel!. Each episode will explore a topic in Computer Science, a topic in Music, and combine them in creative ways. You can find the code I use for each episode here! The story The reason I decided to start this show was because, thanks to COVID-19, I was no longer performing live with my jazz trio, but I was aching for some type of performative output.

January 24, 2021 Read