It’s free, it’s fast, it’s fun, it’s bop for the free Pure Data Vanilla. It runs on old computers. It runs on Raspberry Pi. “You probably don’t have any use for bop,” its developer says humbly – but wait, with everything from text sequencing to reverbs to esoteric musical notation, this looks great!
Bob Jarvis sends this in. Here’s a cute demo:
It’s fast and friendly to use. You’ll find synths, a sampler, some effects, a sequencer, and some unique ways of working with harmony using short snippets of code. That library of instruments includes subtractive, FM, physical modeling, and Casio-style sampling, and even a Casio SK-1-inspired polyphonic sampler with multisampler support.
And there’s a direct from disk audio streamer – a feature sorely missing in Pd vanilla. (Checking that now.)
Pd is free across macOS, Windows, and Linux on virtually any architecture, and now many folks are running it as a plug-in via Plug Data (you’ll be hearing about that a lot from me).
What’s nice is that it’s quite easy to tweak, mess with parameter messages, and spawn UIs on the fly.
You could embed this into gadgets – like, for instance, hack a RasPi into an old Novation Launchpad for your own fun standalone hardware. You could use it in distributed installations, too, which is what Bob tells us they did:
Much of the design is informed by having worked on pi-based spatial speaker arrays and learning some of pitfalls of working with clusters of many devices, as well as working with limited CPUs. But bop also makes it very fast and easy to hook a MIDI controller up patch together a working synthesizer, and the text-based sequencing is very flexible and could be used to control anything, so there are many use-cases I’m sure I haven’t thought of.
I’m going to disagree with creator Bob Jarvis and say this is really eminently usable – a return to some of the fast, friendly abstractions in the tradition of RjDj. (If you don’t know rjlib, it’s still handy to pull it up even in 2025.)
“Wait, how esoteric can that notation system be?” I asked myself. Whoa – so esoteric. It’s called semisteps, formerly known as “intermals,” and it encodes chord voicings as floats. Or you can use it to tune strings. Or do some bitplucking. Or use it a a speculative text-based language. (Okay – this qualifies as esoteric, even for me.)
Actually, some of the language looks fabulously simple – use “g” for the granular synth bank; set envelopes quickly. Check it out.
Pd builds on Pd, as usual – these abstractions are also drawn from pd-mkmr by Mike Moreno.
And more links – PhD research, large-scale wifi-controlled speaker arrays, and about those installations, see The Plants by Playable Streets.
This is the kind of bopping around we need right now. bop on.
Bob shows more of their world here – love it and hi, Melbourne!:
And if it sounded like semisteps would be awesome for live coding, now you’re getting it – here’s Bob showing it with Push, doing some cool stuff with pitches: