notation

Guy Steele's invited talk at Clojure/conj on the informal metanotation computer scientists use in papers to describe languages. He traces how this notation developed and why it is often unspecified and arcane.

Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.

Gerald Jay Sussman speaks at Dan Friedman's 60th birthday celebration about how programming helps formulate and clarify ideas. He argues that ambiguous mathematical notation hinders understanding.

A 1974 talk-show-style interview with the original developers of APL, including Iverson, Falkoff and Breed. They discuss how the language originated.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

A Pitchfork TV documentary following Dan Deacon in Montana as he finishes his album Bromst. It shows the experimentation behind it, including pieces written for MIDI-driven player pianos.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

A two-minute demonstration of LucasArts' iMUSE adaptive music system in Monkey Island 2. It shows music layers and transitions changing seamlessly as the player moves.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

Donald Knuth explains at Stanford's CCRMA the constraint-based methods he is using to compose a major work for pipe organ.

Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.

Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2018 keynote on preventing, finding and fixing bugs under a time budget. He covers testing practice, type annotation tradeoffs and the limits of coverage metrics.

A 2015 GDC talk by Bungie's Barry Genova on how Destiny's engine was restructured into a job graph with limited thread pre-emption. It is aimed at programmers of demanding game engines.