Sessions at Clojure/West 2012 about Overtone on Friday 16th March

Overtone places a whirlwind of sound synthesis and music making opportunities within realistic reach of all Clojure programmers. However, the staggering set of possibilities can often overwhelm the intrepid music programmer seeking their first musical experience.

This talk will introduce an overview of a number of key synthesis and live programming concepts and techniques arming you with an arsenal of important tools to start your adventures with.

Be warned: this presentation will release the Clojurepunk within you.

This unjam will gather current and prospective Overtone hackers together to create an exciting opportunity for collaborative performance.

We will start with simple instructions of how to create basic sounds on the Overtone REPL and then let people creatively modify and generate noises spontaneously to create a cacophony of noise. We will then look into ways to structure and coordinate this sound so that we feel more like an orchestra or band than bunch of monkeys randomly hacking away. We will take two approaches - first we'll try and come up with a collaborative composition which will be conducted by one of the attendees. Finally we will look at how using one Overtone instance as a coordination server can allow rhythms and beats to be tightly synchronised.

The session will be fun, noisy and will strongly encourage exploratory and on-the-fly Clojure hacking.