For the fourth time (since Jan 2021), we have prepared 31 inspiring code art prompts for anyone who wants to sharpen their creative coding skills during this monthly challenge.
Related to this, many top AI conferences are calling for art for AI art exhibitions: https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2023/CallForCreativeAI
I unfortunately didn't go to NeurIPS this year, but I'd love to hear what it was like from someone who did attend.
Edit: Hey my bad the prompts for Genuary are all for making visuals, but I suppose they could be interpreted for audio too. My bad, but I'll leave my music-nerd rant below in tact in case anyone finds it useful
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Music:
- Eli Fieldsteel's intro to SuperCollider course is fantastic. SuperCollider language is kind of nice. Function literals are simply curly braces, `{}`, and the last expression is returned. It has pipe's for function arguments, so if you squint it kind of feels like Ruby or Rust.
// a silly function. Note that paren "blocks" make evaluating multiple lines easier
(
x = {|num| num.squared + 42 };
y = x.(0);
)
- Sonic Pi is built on-top of SuperCollider, but it's MUCH easier to get started with making bleeps and bloops. Sam Aaron, who originally created Overtone (a Clojure front-end for SuperCollider) created Sonic Pi initially to teach kids computer programming and music, but now it's turning into a pretty nice live-coding setup. The language is basically a DSL extension of Ruby, and although it's very elegant, I feel like it's a little nerfed in terms of a full language when compared to SCLang, so I'm sticking with the latter for now. High recommend checking it out if you're new to making music or code. https://sonic-pi.net/
- This 'Intro To Live Coding' vid from Alex McLean is great. Gives a good overview of a few fun tools out there that I won't mention here for sake of time (check out Gibber and Hydra for web-based coding things. Gibber is really slick). Alex invented Tidal Cycles, which I feel is like god-tier in terms of power and conciseness. Maybe I'll tinker with Tidal someday, but I want to start with SC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QY2x6aZzqc
Graphics
- Processing is a great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JzDttgdILQ
- Great intro to programming shaders for art from kishimisu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s1h2YETNY
- Inigo Quilex invented ShaderToy among other things. I haven't watched this yet but I'm sure it's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE
- Hydra looks pretty neat for live-coding graphics in the browser: https://hydra.ojack.xyz/
I was really hoping to find a platform that would allow for integrating a programmatic 'score' of music and drive visuals from it, like one step above just using the wave-form to trigger visuals.. I don't know if I've found what I'm happy with yet.. I think I'll try to hook up the OSC signals from SuperCollider with some visuals, but not sure. I want to use shaders if possible, and SC doesn't really support that. Gibber seems great but I'm not sure. Maybe Tidal has it, but the Tidal lang might take a while to learn. I want to use raw frequency values for the notes as much as possible, and that's really easy in SC. I don't want to be stuck using midi notes.
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As someone who's been making art with code for a long time, I'm under the impression that "generative", in the context of computers and art, has had another change of meaning recently.
"Making generative art" now seems synonymous to "giving a prompt to a black-box model created by a large corporation". Maybe Genuary is better described as "algorithmic art"? At the very least, you have to be aware that a wall of misunderstanding has appeared between people using different definitions. Maybe this is invisible to people inside a community, but this wall has appeared around the community and it's probably not helping.