Music composition with Ruby

What if I told you that you could use your knowledge of Ruby to create sounds even songs? In this talk, I will show you how you can go from coding a beat to a full song whether you are a musician or not.

Transcript

1. Music composition with Ruby Sandra Kpodar WNB.rb meetup - October 2025
2. Who am I? • I’m a freelance software engineer with a background in education. I’m currently based in France • I'm also an ambivert (half-way between introversion and extroversion) • Generative art is of great interest to me
3. What was the starting point?
4. Why did I learn to write music in Ruby?
5. How did I learn?
6. With whom?
8. What’s the first thing we could do?
9. What I’ll need to create the first beat • The sample command • The times method in Ruby • The sleep command
10. Creating a first beat
11. Adding a pattern of notes with specific times
12. What could a song look like in Ruby?
13. If you’re unfamiliar with music notes, use the table below • The play command • The times method • The sleep command • Music notes Credit: Mehackit
14. From a beat to a song
15. The structure of the song
16. How does it now sound?
17. Visualising the song
18. Seeing and hearing the full song
19. Why am I drawing your attention to this creative practice now?
20. Any questions?
21. Let's keep in touch • Mastodon: @sandrakpodar@hachyderm.io • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandrakpodar
22. Thank you 󰚣 • WNB.rb folks who kindly gave some feedback on earlier versions of this lightning talk: Jess, Harriet, Christine • The meetup organising team: Adrianna, Emily • Folks outside of this community who also showed me support and provided feedback on the content: R., D., F.
23. Some helpful links • Sonic Pi's official website: https://sonic-pi.net/tutorial.html • Sonic Pi on GitHub: https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi • Sonic Pi's forum in_thread: https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net/
24. Credits • Illustrations: Pablo Stanley on opendoodles.com, Shiho for the Black woman in pink and red