Beyond Sonic Pi: Tau5 & the Art of Coding with AI

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Sam Aaron - Live Coding Musician and Creator of Sonic Pi @SamAaron RESOURCES https://www.patreon.com/samaaron https://twitter.com/samaaron https://github.com/samaaron https://linkedin.com/in/samaaron ABSTRACT For over a decade, Sonic Pi has been used in classrooms around the world to teach programming through music. Students learn sequencing, loops, data structures, and algorithms while coding beats, basslines, and shimmering synths. At the same time, professional musicians have taken Sonic Pi to stages and concert halls, using programming itself as an instrument of musical expression. Now the story continues with Tau5, a new live coding system focused on collaboration. In music, concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance aren’t just safety nets - they are uncompromising demands. When harnessed, they can be transformed into powerful creative possibilities for human expression and connection. Collaboration isn’t limited to humans. Tau5 also experiments with AI as a creative partner, asking not what machines can replace, but how they might improvise with us. This keynote reflects on the lessons these explorations in music and code can teach us about collaboration, creativity, and education in the age of AI. Along the way, we’ll explore concurrency, rhythm, and the subtle but critical difference between working at the same time and working truly in time. Dont just pattern match - rhythm catch! […] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 00:13 DJ set with Sam Aaron feat. Sonic Pi 08:30 Intro No. 2 12:07 Sonic Pi demo 21:00 Teaching kids to code 28:50 DJ Dave 30:33 Demo 36:00 Joe Armstrong’s contribution 36:48 José Valim & Elixir 37:17 The Black Dog 39:18 Collaborative jamming 47:32 Visuals 59:51 Outro Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3744