Programming music with flotsam – for the first time, it’s truly screen-less livecoding. All the synthesis is done on the Raspberry Pi too (raspbian release in the works). One of the surprising things I find with tangible programming is the enforced scarcity of tokens, having to move them around provides a situation that is good to play around with, in contrast to being able to simply type more stuff into a text document.
The programming language is pretty simple and similar to the yarn sequence language from the weavecoding project. The board layout consist of 4 rows of 8 possible tokens. Each row represents a single l-system rule:
Rule A: o o o o o o o o
Rule B: o o o o o o o o
Rule C: o o o o o o o o
Rule D: o o o o o o o o
The tokens themselves consist of 13 possible values:
a,b,c,d : The 'note on' triggers for 4 synth patches
. : Rest one beat
+,- : Change current pitch
<,> : Change current synth patch set
A,B,C,D : 'Jump to' rule (can be self-referential)
No-token: Ends the current rule
The setup currently runs to a maximum depth of 8 generations – so a rule referring to itself expands 8 times. A single rule ‘A’ such as ‘+ b A - c A ‘ expands to this sequence (the first 100 symbols of it anyway):
+b+b+b+b+b+b+b+b+b+b-c-c+b-c-c+b+b-c-c+b-c-c+b+b+b-c-c+b-c-c+b+b-c-c+b-c-c+b+b+b+b-c-c+b-c-c+b+b-c-c
I’m still working on how best to encode musical structures this way, as it needs a bit more expression – something to try is running them in parallel so you can have different sequences at the same time. With a bit more tweaking (and with upcoming hardware improvements) the eventual plan is to use this on some kid’s programming teaching projects.