I always liked the simplicity of music trackers. As a developer it is very appealing to think of music as a sequence of time-based repetitive events. It resembles the flow of a program written in an imperative language.

Glitch is a minimal environment for making algorithmic music and live coding. It uses simple arithmetic expressions as a programming language and has only a few functions to learn, yet it allows creating some interesting music pieces.

“Get Yucky” is a four-chord looping melody made from scratch using Glitch. It was written to show that music can be written with just arithmetic expressions.

Glitch is a great tool if you want to start with algorithmic music. It’s simple and straightforward. To master Glitch you only need to remember 15 functions.

But moving from bytebeat and oscillators to actual music might be difficult for newcomers…

Glitch started as a Bytebeat music synthesizer. Bytebeat has some really unique features: simple concept, terse notation, dirty old-school sound. But at the same point Bytebeat is limited by its ultra-simplicity.