The Sounds of Music Created, Connected, Visualized and Remixed
By Gareth Wilson

August 8, 2017

The Sounds of Music Created, Connected, Visualized and Remixed

Music might just be the ultimate creative medium. Its effect on us is powerful. It can drive an emotion, fill us with energy, or chill us right out. It can be combined with video, lighting, dance and best of all — there’s no expectation about what music should be. It doesn’t have to make money, have an efficient design, be made in any particular way, or use any specific tool. Anything goes.

This free-form creativity inspired Glitch. Its design is rooted in music, and we think there’s a lot that, as coders and creators, we can learn from it.

For example, I learned to play the guitar as a teenager. A local, older kid used to come to my house each week — we’d hang out, and he’d teach me little snippets from songs I was into. I picked up a book of chords and I’d practice them between those ‘lessons’. After a few months, I felt comfortable enough to join a band and I’ve played on and off ever since. I’m no Hendrix, but I can play.

I contrast this fun, organic learning experience with learning to code. To begin coding you need to know about, not just programming syntax, but lots of other stuff just to get going. Like which libraries and packages to use, the terminal commands to install and navigate your dev environment, as well as build tools and version control. And that’s all before you get to create your first ‘Hello World’ program, let alone anything that’s cool, which motivates you to keep learning.

I wonder how far I would have gotten with learning to play the guitar if I had to learn how to build the guitar first? Starting with understanding the characteristics of different types of wood, the tools to shape it, before learning about pickups and memorizing some special incantation to unlock the guitar case…

Making music is a fun, iterative, nonlinear, and collaborative process. Which is exactly what learning to code and creating apps could be, if we enabled it.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with Glitch. We remove the technical barriers to getting started, and our community site provides working apps for you to remix. So you can focus on the fun, creative parts of building an app, without losing that creative spark.

And now we’re pleased to add a music category to Glitch too. Fusing code and music together, so that you can make apps using the music services you love, create music with code, and learn all that you can from music along the way.

The music category provides a mixture of building block apps that hook into popular services and libraries, and some musical creations from members of the Glitch community. Here are just a few: