Hljómar

Sonic Pi has built-in support for chord names which will return lists. Try it for yourself:

play chord(:E3, :minor)

Now, we’re really getting somewhere. That looks a lot more pretty than the raw lists (and is easier to read for other people). So what other chords does Sonic Pi support? Well, a lot. Try some of these:

Arpeggios

We can easily turn chords into arpeggios with the function play_pattern:

play_pattern chord(:E3, :m7)

Ok, that’s not so fun - it played it really slowly. play_pattern will play each note in the list with a call to sleep 1 after each call to play. We can use another function play_pattern_timed to specify our own timings and speed things up:

play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m7), 0.25

We can even pass a list of times which it will treat as a circle of times:

play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m13), [0.25, 0.5]

This is the equivalent to:

play 52, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 55, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 59, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 62, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 66, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 69, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 73, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25

Which would you prefer to write?

Note that play_pattern and play_pattern_timed alter the sustain of the notes to fill the times. You can remove this behavior by setting the sustain: opt to 0:

play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m13), [0.25, 0.5], sustain: 0