Acords

Sonic Pi has built-in support for chord names which will return lists. Try it for yourself:

play chord(:E3, :minor)

Now, we’re really getting somewhere. That looks a lot more pretty than the raw lists (and is easier to read for other people). So what other chords does Sonic Pi support? Well, a lot. Try some of these:

Arpeggios

We can easily turn chords into arpeggios with the function play_pattern:

play_pattern chord(:E3, :m7)

Ok, that’s not so fun - it played it really slowly. play_pattern will play each note in the list separated with a call to sleep 1 between each call to play. We can use another function play_pattern_timed to specify our own timings and speed things up:

play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m7), 0.25

We can even pass a list of times which it will treat as a circle of times:

play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m13), [0.25, 0.5]

This is the equivalent to:

play 52
sleep 0.25
play 55
sleep 0.5
play 59
sleep 0.25
play 62
sleep 0.5
play 66
sleep 0.25
play 69
sleep 0.5
play 73

Which would you prefer to write?