making music in the shell -- with Soundb0ard

Damn. What a rabbit hole! Live Coding. I’ve never been into this too much in the past, but currently I have read this nice interview from Cycling74 with Thorsten Sideboard.

…and then I stumbled across this video of him. Hell yes, what a cool dude!

…and an awesome performance with his handcrafted live coding platform Soundb0ard. A treasure and all open-source. 🔥

I wanted to try it out immediately. Here are my steps.

Building and running Soundb0ard

First clone

git clone git@github.com:sideb0ard/SoundB0ard.git

My steps on my Mac OS system were:

Install some libraries

PortAudio

http://www.portaudio.com/download.html

./configure --disable-mac-universal && make

make install

This is the only library I installed without using brew. I thought this would be fun, but brew is so much less pain:

brew install portaudio

PortMidi

http://portmedia.sourceforge.net/portmidi/

brew install portmidi

libsndfile

http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

brew install libsndfile

ctags

http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

brew install ctags

cscope

http://cscope.sourceforge.net/

brew install cscope

liblo

http://liblo.sourceforge.net/

brew install liblo

readline

brew install readline

Ableton Link

Clone Link from https://github.com/ableton/link

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git clone git@github.com:Ableton/link.git
cd link
git submodule update --init --recursive

Range-v3

https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3

Googletest

https://github.com/google/googletest

Google Performance Tools

https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools

brew install gperftools

Update CMakeLists.txt

mkdir -p cmake wget -O cmake/CPM.cmake https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake/releases/latest/download/get_cpm.cmake

Update the Makefile

There are some path settings which needs to be changed in the Makefile.

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ABLETONASIOINCDIR=${HOME}/CODE/LIBS/link/modules/asio-standalone/asio/include
READLINEINCDIR=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/8.0.1/include
RANGE3INCDIR=${HOME}/CODE/LIBS/range-v3/include
HOMEBREWINCDIR=${HOME}/homebrew/include

GTEST_DIR =  ${HOME}/CODE/LIBS/googletest/googletest
INCDIRS=-I/usr/local/include \
		-Iinclude \
		-I${HOME}/CODE/LIBS/link/include \
		-I${HOMEBREWINCDIR} \
		-I${RANGE3INCDIR} \
		-I${ABLETONASIOINCDIR} \
		-I${READLINEINCDIR}

HOMEBREWLIBDIR=${HOME}/homebrew/lib
READLINELIBDIR=${HOME}/homebrew/opt/readline/lib

LIBDIRS=-L/usr/local/lib -L${HOMEBREWLIBDIR} -L${READLINELIBDIR}

These are of course specific to my current system.

make it

…and then a simple make is enough to build the application.

$ make
$ Boom! make some noise...

Good point. Lets try it out.

How to play with it

You can start the shell by running ./sbsh from the command line and you are presented a nice colorful intro screen:

I want to collect some infos about the commands and keyboard shortcuts. I haven’t found a full documentation yet, but try to figure some stuff by playing around.

WORK IN PROGRESS

keyboard shortcuts

• control + D : Exit soundb0ard shell

shell commands

• ps : show running processes with instruments and algorithms
• ls : list samples in wavs/ folder

Looping a sample

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let l1 = loop(loops/VEH4-24.wav);
set l1:len 4;

VEH4-24.wav is in this case a wav file I put into the wavs/loops/ folder.

Setting BPM

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bpm 128

Loading and playing a sample

Trying to play a simple kick.

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let s1 = sample(kicks/kick8.aif);

Play it using a pattern

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p1 $ "s1 s1 s1 s1"

it seems that you can have up to 99 pattern (p1 - p99).

Adding effects to a loop

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let l1 = loop(loops/VE4-24.wav)
addFx(l1, "reverb")

With addFx you can add couple of effects:

• bitcrush
• compressor
• delay (default delay 200ms)
• filter
• reverb
• sidechain
• moddelay
• modfilter
• waveshape

sidechain requires a second argument, which defines the trigger signal used for sidechaining (What is sidechaing? See this nice article by Ableton). For example a kick:

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let l1 = loop(loops/VE4-24.wav)
let k1 = sample(kicks/kick8.aif)
addFx(l1, "sidechain", k1)

Set volume of a track

You can set the volume to a track with a value range of [0.0, 1.0]

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let l1 = loop(loops/VE4-24.wav)
vol l1 0.4

Modify the looper loops

In the examples above I have used the looper using the loop command.

The looper allows some modifications:

• active : set l1:active 0 to deactivate and set l1:active 1 to activate
• pitch
• mode
• gate_mode
• idx
• len
• scamble
• stutter
• step
• reverse
• grain_dur_ms
• grains_per_sec
• density_dur_sync
• quasi_grain_fudge
• fill_factor
• grain_spray_ms
• selection_mode
• env_mode

The Moog MiniSynth

There is this minisynth included callled moog. And there are a bunch of presets already included in the file moogpresets.dat which can be loaded using loadPreset:

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let m1 = moog()
loadPreset(m1, "pacman")
p1 $ "m1 m1 m1"

Presets include e.g.

• sharpie
• wiffle
• rumbllrrSQR2
• androidDreams

For a full list take a look on the .dat file.

with # instead of $ you can send MIDI notes to the device:

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let mo = moog()
loadPreset(mo, "remotev")
p1 # "c3 d4 c3 a3" mo

Pattern

This is currently the most confusing part on my side.

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let k1 = sample(kicks/kick8.aif)
p1 $ "k1 k1 k1"

• [] : pattern group
• <> : multi step pattern
• () : setting euclidian rhythm e.g. ((3,8), (5,13))
• $ : prepending this allows you to access values from the [Env] environment – like your loaded samples etc.
• # : this allows you to work with values and assign it to a target (e.g. sending MIDI notes to a synth)

…only the beginning. Will continue to add more infos when I am ready :)