The Disquiet Junto is a weekly composition challenge.
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0413-objective-thankfulness/27266
Challenge 413, linked above, set the goal of make music using just one bit of equipment for which you are thankful. There were lots of contenders. My guitars and piano; surge; rack; the various MPE devices I've acquired; logic pro. Lots and lots.
But when I thought about my last year, so much of my music has interwoven itself with programming, and programming in C++. So I thought that c++-14 was the bit of equipment I was thankful for.
To make that not dumb, I set myself a little challenge. Could I, from first principles, write a single C++ file which if compiled with a modern compiler would output a bit of music. Bootstrap everything from a blank page. Write oscillators, filters effects, the whole nine yards. And do it in a couple of days.
OK so I allowed myself exactly two cheats. I used libsndfile rather than writing a WAV binary myself. And I looked
up the coefficients for an LPF and HPF biquad rather than deriving them by hand again. But the rest of it I just
banged together over the thanksgiving long weekend, to render a monophonic theme I wrote for solo piano in 2013.
This is a dumb thing to do. My code is slow and sloppy and wasteful. And it could have been done in a few minutes with any of a variety of tools, like csound, or whatever. But it was fun and pedagogically useful, and reminded me to be thankful for all the skills I've gained with the synth and DSP work I've been doing recently, and also to remember that the end goal is indeed music.
Hear the music here:
https://soundcloud.com/baconpaul/thankful-for-c-14-disquiet0413
Enjoy!