Generating Music with Python and FoxDot
By Jessica Garson

Audience: This talk is suited well for all audiences due to the live coding nature of this talk. Since making music with Python is something that beginner programmers can start with and advanced audiences could find interacting with Python in this way meaningful.

An outline of my talk is as follows:

Set Up This talk will be live coded using the Python. There will also some slides that will be available on my website jessicagarson.com/Making-Music-with-Python, All code samples will also be up on my GitHub.

Introduce Myself Quick intro to set up the narrative of my presentation - Starting with something like: “Hi, my name is Jessica Garson. I’m currently teaching Python at NYU. I’m also a live coding DJ know as Messica Arson, I’ve performed with Live Code NYC, the Future of Funk Labs as part of the DC Funk Parade and Hack && Tell DC ”. I’ll also cover administrative topics such where to find slides, and code samples from today’s talk, and a link to code samples on my GitHub. I’ll also provide my twitter handle. These will be displayed on a slide as well.

There is Something Magical About Hearing a Computer Make Sounds You Told It To I’ll tell the story about how I started a live coding and discuss why making music with code is so powerful.

FoxDot Installation We'll discuss how install FoxDot and some errors I ran into while setting up.

Tour of the IDE This will be a walkthrough the IDE.

The Coolest Part - The Tutorial Is Built In We'll run an example from the tutorial.

Basic Syntax We'll discuss what the syntax looks like and how to create sounds easily.

p1, s1, d1? We'll discuss what this means and how each channel helps layer sound differently.

Errors What happens when you get errors, how do you solve them.

Creating Our Melody We'll create our melody to our song, and discuss how to keep your changes in sync with the flow of your song.

Adding Effects and Changing Our Sound We'll make changes to our sound by arranging the effects.

Using Samples We’ll discuss how to use samples. There are a bunch pre-loaded in and we'll discuss how to find them

Adding Outside Samples I’ll add in a sample of my own voice assigned to a variable and create a loop which plays this sample.

Creating a Melody I’ll create a loop that creates a melody and explain what the code is doing to create this sound.

How does FoxDot compare to the rest of the live coding ecosystem? We'll compare FoxDot to TidalCycles and SonicPi and discuss the future of live coding.

Dance Party We will listen to our song we created (hopefully a dance party will break out).

Next Steps I’ll point to a list of resources on my GitHub repository for the talk for learning more about a Python and FoxDot. I’ll also give my contact information for keeping in touch and thank attendees for coming to the talk.