Atoms

Music is created by exploiting relationships between sounds, not by sounds in isolation

Music is made by mixing and matching small musical ideas, then changing those combinations over time

Music notation is a tool for storing and communicating musical ideas, not a prerequisite for musicianship

New beat began when DJ Dikke Ronny played the EBM record Flesh at 33 rpm instead of 45

New beat is a late-1980s Belgian EDM genre fusing new wave, hi-NRG, EBM, and hip-hop

New beat was the immediate precursor to Belgian hardcore techno and gabber

Nu-disco is a house-rooted genre built on live-feel disco grooves and fresh composition rather than sampling old records

OBS captures desktop audio and microphone by default; a wrong device selection yields a silent stream

OBS composits a scene from stackable sources such as display, window, and webcam capture

OBS's Auto-Configuration Wizard picks encoding settings from your intent, hardware, and network

Open-source DIY Eurorack modules can be built for around $20 and an hour each, making modular affordable

p5.js carries Processing's accessibility goal to the browser as a visual-first creative-coding environment

Physically Based Rendering is a free CC-licensed textbook coupling rendering theory with a full implementation

Pitch is the singable 'how high or low' quality of a sound, distinct from noise you can only call high or low

Pre-internet record shops functioned as community hubs where producers, DJs, and fans exchanged music and built the scene

Progressive house emerged in the early-1990s UK rave scene as a marketing break from American house

Progressive house grew as a natural progression of late-1980s North American and European house

Progressive house split into a 1990s atmospheric-club identity and a 2010s festival-mainstage identity

Projecting live code on screen provides an alternative perceptual channel for deaf audiences

Projection mapping tools trade ease-of-use against programmability across three tiers

Projection mapping turns physical objects into display surfaces for video

Proto-dubstep emerged from South London producers' experiments on the B-sides of UK garage releases around 1999–2002

Psychedelic trance developed directly out of Goa trance as its successor genre

Pure Data is a real-time visual dataflow language where connected boxes replace text code

QWERTY was intentionally designed to slow typing, making it worse than a random layout ergonomically

Real-time computer control of sound synthesis dates to Max Mathews' GROOVE system (1968)

Removing cost, installation, and first-step difficulty is what makes a creative-coding tool usable by beginners

Renardo is the actively maintained successor to FoxDot for Python live coding over SuperCollider

Revival events transmit a scene's foundational sounds to new generations through original artists

Rotterdam Records, founded by Paul Elstak in 1992, was the first Dutch hardcore/gabber label

Sharing work publicly early accelerates skill development through feedback and accountability

Sonic Pi uses music to solve the engagement problem in teaching programming, not a technical one

Sonic Pi was built to teach programming to school children through music-making

Strudel is a browser-based JavaScript port of the TidalCycles pattern language

Strudel runs entirely in the browser at strudel.cc, requiring no install to start making sound

Strudel's MiniREPL is an inline interactive editor for running and editing code samples in the docs

Swing was first popularized in 1930s US jazz, with no single formula across players

Synth controls range from changing one aspect of the sound to changing many at once

Synth Secrets is a 63-part Sound On Sound series covering synthesis from waveforms to instrument emulation

Synthwave is an electronic microgenre built on 1970s-80s film-soundtrack sounds and 1980s nostalgia

Techno is instrumental 4/4 electronic dance music at 120-150 BPM, built on production technology for continuous DJ sets

The 'trip hop' label was coined by Mixmag in 1994 but was rejected by the Bristol artists it described

The 1971 Sandin Image Processor pioneered an open, roll-your-own philosophy prefiguring open-source tool culture

The 1979 anti-disco backlash targeted Black and gay music and pushed dance music underground

The 1991 Love Parade unified Germany's scattered techno-house scenes into a national movement

The 2011 film Drive was the placement that catapulted synthwave into mainstream recognition

The algorave definition parodies UK rave law, swapping 'repetitive beats' for 'repetitive conditionals'

The algorave moved live coding from experimental venues into clubs with dancefloors, first held in London in 2012

The algorave movement is driven by decentralised local community groups, not a central body

The Amen break is a ~7-second drum break from the Winstons' 1969 B-side 'Amen, Brother'

The choice of first programming language matters less than the transferable principles it teaches

The decibel is a logarithmic ratio, because the ear judges level in ratios rather than absolute differences

The definition of 'live' in electronic music is genuinely ambiguous — spanning fixed playback to fully improvised hardware performance

The demoscene emerged from software cracktro culture in the 1980s as a realtime audiovisual art form

The earliest recordings of computer-generated music date to 1950s machines, with Turing's lab among the origins

The fall of the Berlin Wall opened vacant East Berlin spaces that catalysed the Berlin techno scene

The four-on-the-floor kick pattern — house music's signature — became the dominant rhythmic template in all contemporary dance music

The Hacking Choreography manifesto applies live-coding transparency values to dance: code is visible on stage, and dancers can subvert the program

The laptop's portability and price point make it a more accessible instrument than a piano, democratising music production

The live-coding community values human struggle and failure over AI-generated output