Chicago Clojure Meet Up: Overtone

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Chicago Clojure meet up on Overtone. This was actually the first meet up I've ever attended. Over all, the experience was really cool. First, I was pleased to see 20 people gathered about Clojure. I love Clojure and I was excited to see other people passionate about Clojure. Second, the software demoed, Overtone, was really cool. Kevin Neaton, one of the contributors, gave an hour and a half demo on the capabilities of the Overtone, and a brief preview of where the project is going. For those unfamiliar, Overtone is an open source project that allows users to create musical synthesizers. So, Kevin started the night by showing us a very simple sine wave and then incrementally built upon it throughout the night until he created a dub-step beat. Pretty cool. The Overtone project offers the benefit of being written in Clojure, which offers some cool features, for instance, recursive beats. The built-in recursion of Clojure allows users to create recursive beats with ease. Also, it offers users the REPL. Users can fire up the REPL and create, test and demo beats on the fly without a ritzy setup. Overtone seems like a great tool for musicians and audiophiles alike. However, being neither of the two, I don't see myself using Overtone much, except of course to play around a see what comes out. Overall, I had a great time at the meet up and I hope to keeping attending.