Impromptu 2.5 has been out for a while now but I’ve never realised it contained this new handy feature: an ‘error hook’: The interpreter will now throw to an error hook providing you with greater control over exception handling. You initiate the livecoding error hook by calling (sys:livecoding-error-hook #t). Errors are then passed to the [...]

The other day I was thinking: when I use the play macro in Impromptu [video tutorial], in my head it’s already obvious what’s the virtual instrument I want to play. So why do I have to specify that all the time? Wouldn’t it be more natural just being able to say, for example, get this [...]

Imagine you’ve got a bunch of audio samples you want to load up while livecoding with Impromptu but you can’t remember exactly their names – it’d be handy to be able to open up the corresponding Finder window directly from scheme, without too much clicking around. Do-able or not? I spent some time trying to [...]

Good news for livecoders: a new version of Impromptu is available (direct link to the 2.5 dmg package). Apart from various bug fixes, it looks like as if the major development is the ICR (impromptu compiler runtime), a new set of scheme functions that facilitate the creation of faster bytecode, so that computationally-intensive tasks such [...]

… So you’ve decided to know everything about scheme and rock the world using fast-paced programming environments like Impromptu. Well, I confess I did think that on several occasions, but still I haven’t made it even half way through the schemer pilgmim’s path. But I’ve collected quite a few useful resources in the process, and [...]

I’ve been experimenting a bit with picking random notes from a scale using various voices simultaneously, so to create interesting sounds textures… and what came out is maybe a bit too random at the beginning, but getting more interesting towards the end imho … Oh yeah, the song is called ‘My Misty Morning’.

A short movie about livecoding, Andrew Sorensen (creator of Impromptu), TOPLAP and other related stuff. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, I’d say it’s the most pleasant introduction to it available at the moment! Thanks Stepher Ramsay for doing this!

>>> When you’re Impromptu-ing but don’t know the meaning or syntax of a function, the usual thing to do is calling (help function-name) to get some help about that function, or (help function-name #t) if you want to see also the examples associated with it. The help text gets displayed in the log view, so [...]

Finally I managed to shrink down to a reasonable size and upload the video recording from our last livecoding event at Kings College; hopefully the other people will be uploading theirs too some time soon .. >>>

I made a new track with Impromptu, called Xanadu. Took me a little bit to build up the song base, then then I think it gets more interesting… … If you don’t care about the ‘coding’ side of things you can listen to a more traditional recording of the track here: Xanadu by magicrebirth