TWID #22: Learning Orca
Learning orca to understand the possibilities of livecoding music.
This week I spend some time to learn the basics of Orca. A software (or programming language) for sequencing midi and osc data in an interesting way.
What is Orca
Orca is made by Hundred Rabbits, a small artist collective that do all kind of interesting things and their work is really worth checking out in depth.
On their website they describe it quite perfectly as an esoteric programming language to create procedural sequencers in which each letter of the alphabet performs one operation. It is a flexible live coding environment that lets you output midi or osc data and send it to any other software.
How does Orca work
You have a canvas were you can enter letters and numbers. Each letter performs one operation that can take an input by placing a character next to it, and mostly outputs something below it.
Simple Example
The letter D outputs a bang below it every 8 frames and : is a midi command that takes the channel, octave and note as an input. It sends the midi note whenever a bang occurs next to the : symbol.
.D2
*:01CThat way you have the note C1 playing on channel 1 every 8 Frames.
There are a lot of commands and you can do really complex things if you know how to use them nicely.
Some Music
The audio is coming from Ableton, which receives the midi data from it.
Conclusion
This is a very interesting approach to coding and making music that I really like. I also find the idea of livecoding pretty nice and might explore this direction a bit more.
Other things I did this week
Animations
Drawing
That’s it for this week. Hope you liked it.