Heart of Clojure

TimeLines: Crafting a Live Coding Musical Instrument with & out of Clojure

TimeLines is an ongoing PhD research project in the design and implementation of Live Coding musical instruments. Live Coding is a creative practice that, at its core, involves real-time Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with a live and dynamic computational system - as much an instrument as an open-ended instrument-building workbench. TimeLines follows a purely functional approach to music, treating both the synthesis of sounds and of musical structure to be functions of just a single numerical argument: time itself. All time-varying behavior is encoded in those pure functions, enabling the potential for massive parallelization and static analyses. Clojure's Lisp-heritage's metaprogramming powers are greatly relied upon to make an instrument that is capable of creating and extending itself.