Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code
At first glance this looks very cool. There is a lot of good documentations and it seems like a powerful set of libraries around it to make something very neat.<p>BUT...to put my PM hat on, I'm not sure who is the target audience here?<p>A - musicians who want to compose music with code.
B - people who want to learn programming by having fun with music creation.
C - programmers who want to learn music theory.<p>If the intention is a fun vehicle to to teach programming, then I think there are better ways. I looked thought the samples and I think as a kid I would get tired very quickly. There are so many function calls to learn. Right away I have to understand the concept of random and what it does.<p>I think if the idea is to empower musicians, this seems like a lot of work to create music.<p>At the end, you have to know some music principle and already understand a lot of different programming concepts to actually do anything.<p>This combination makes doing programming dependent on knowing music theory and creating music knowing a lot of programming and exploring all the different functions and libraries to then apply your music theory to.<p>To me it would be frustrating. And for musicians who I guess, can potentially create some sounds that might be difficult with existing tools, just to hard to do.<p>It would have been far better to have a simple 2D game board (tanks, robots, etc. I know it's been done) as a programing tool than inside a complex world of music theory.<p>Or at least make the libraries not dependent on music theory and provided some higher level presets with built in abstractions. Example: loop song(type: techno_beat, length:300) (do some stuff here) end_loop<p>Make the user feel like superhuman musicians.