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kennethreitzandClaude Opus 4.8
789b00eb85
- New theme pages for the Python-music arc and the self-hosting/archives arc - Backfill 8 stale theme pages through June 2026 (21 uncovered essays -> 0) - Link photo-archive essays from photography hub, music essays from music hub - Every former orphan essay now has 2-4 inbound hub links Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
41 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# Music as Code
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I'm a percussionist by training and an electronic musician by history, and for five years I made almost no music at all. Then AI collaboration broke the block, and what came out the other side wasn't a return to the old studio — it was something stranger: music written in Python. Scores that are scripts. Synthesis from first principles. Tools that listen to language the way an ear does.
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This thread collects that body of work. The premise underneath all of it: code and music are both languages for structuring time, and the boundary between composing and programming was always thinner than it looked.
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### The Breakthrough
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- [**PyTheory: Breaking Through Five Years of Creative Block with AI**](/essays/2026-03-22-pytheory_breaking_through_five_years_of_creative_block_with_ai) — The origin story. Five years of silence ended by a music theory library and a thinking partner.
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- [**PyTheory Is Awesome**](/essays/2026-03-25-pytheory_is_awesome) — The library itself: fretboards, chords, and theory as data structures.
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### The Instrument Is the Interpreter
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- [**A Mini DAW in the Python REPL**](/essays/2026-03-25-a_mini_daw_in_the_python_repl) — A digital audio workstation that fits in a prompt.
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- [**NumPy as Synth Engine**](/essays/2026-03-29-numpy_as_synth_engine) — Synthesis from arrays. No samples, no plugins, just math becoming sound.
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- [**Free OP-XY Presets, Made from Python**](/essays/2026-04-01-free_op_xy_presets_from_python) — The Python synthesis engine feeding patches to hardware.
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### The Album
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- [**Interpretations: An Album Written in Python**](/essays/2026-04-01-interpretations_an_album_written_in_python) — Twenty-four tracks, each one a script that renders to WAV. No DAW. The code is the score. The full album lives [here](/music/interpretations).
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### Tools for the Ear
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- [**RhymePad: Seeing the Sound**](/essays/2026-06-11-rhymepad_seeing_the_sound) — A scratchpad that reads the phonetics of verse and paints the rhyme architecture as you type. Built for poets and rappers; rhyme is music in language.
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### What the Body Knows
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- [**What the Snare Drum Knew Before I Did**](/essays/2026-04-17-what_the_snare_drum_knew_before_i_did) — The counterweight to everything above. Twenty years of rudiments, and the knowledge that lives beneath language — the part of music no script can hold.
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### Heritage
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- [**Understanding Ableton Push**](/essays/2013-01-understanding_ableton_push) — From the analog studio years, when the instruments were hardware and the code was someone else's.
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The studio I built between 2012 and 2018 is gone; I sold all of it. What replaced it is a [tiny synthesizer](/music), a Python interpreter, and a collaborator that never gets tired of rendering one more take. I don't think the old way was wrong. I think the new way is more honest about what I actually am, which is a programmer who hears things.
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### Related Themes
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- [Artificial Intelligence](/themes/artificial-intelligence) — The collaboration that made it possible.
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- [Spiritual Practice & Technology](/themes/spiritual-practice-and-technology) — Practice as devotion, in both crafts.
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- [The "For Humans" Philosophy](/themes/for-humans-philosophy) — Tools that serve the ear, not the spec sheet.
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