A programming language can become a musical instrument performed live in front of an audience

Sam Aaron’s central argument is that code is not confined to business software — it can be shaped into a musical instrument playable on stage. Sonic Pi realizes this: a programmer writes code that produces sound in real time, and the act of writing and running that code is itself the performance. The audience can see the code and hear its results simultaneously, making the programming act legible as performance. This reframes software from a production tool into an expressive medium comparable to a guitar — it can be recognized and appreciated by people who have no coding background.

Examples

A Sonic Pi performer writes play 60 and the audience hears a middle-C note. They modify the pitch live and the sound changes immediately — just as a guitarist changes pitch by moving their finger.

Assessment

Explain what makes a live-coded performance recognizable as a performance to a non-programmer audience. What does Sam Aaron mean when he says he turned ‘a programming language into a musical instrument’?