Non-Deterministic Live Coding with Mégra

On June 12, at 8:08 pm, the collective in residence Toplap gives the online workshop Non-Deterministic Live Coding with Mégra.

Mégra is a domain-specific language for live coding and composing music. It’s focused on the creation, inference and manipulation of Probabilistic Finite Automata, PFA for short, also known as (variable order) Markov chains. Thus, is non-deterministic by nature. In fact, it’s born out of frustration over the static nature of producing music with digital audio workstations, where the composed piece sounds more or less the same every time you hit play.

The great thing about PFA is that they allow for versatile interaction. They can be created from explicit rules, abstract descriptions (like loops and patterns), but also inferred (or learned, in the machine-learning sense) from data. Mégra provides a concise syntax and intuitive methods for all of these interactions so that it can easily be used in live performances.

The introduction will cover the basic concepts of Mégra and some music creation techniques based on them. As Mégra is based on Common Lisp, it will cover some aspects of that as well, as necessary. No previous Common Lisp knowledge is needed to use Mégra, though.

NOTE: The introduction won’t cover the installation process, so if you want to install it beforehand, please follow the official tutorial here.

You can join the workshop on Toplap’s YouTube Channel.

The workshop will be given in English, but you can ask questions in Catalan and Spanish.