🌕 Mercury Live Coding Environment

A minimal and human-readable language for the live coding of algorithmic electronic audiovisual performances.

Mercury currently has 2 versions:

Original version running in Max8 (Windows/Mac only) (you're in the right place)
Web version running in the browser (Windows/Mac/Linux) go to this repo

🚀 Start coding with the latest full version:

👾 Or sketch in the browser playground! (recommended for beginners)

🙏 Support Mercury by becoming a Patron

💬 Join the Discord Community!

📋 Table of Contents

📟 Mercury?
🎮 What can I do with Mercury?
🔭 Who is it for?
👩‍💻 Code together with others!
🚀 Let's get started!
🔎 Read more
👾 Hear what others made
🤓 I like to help
🔋 Powered By
🙏 Thanks
✨ Inspiration
📄 Licenses

📟 About

Mercury is a minimal and human-readable language for the live coding of algorithmic electronic music.

All elements of the language are designed around making code more accessible and less obfuscating for the audience. This motivation stretches down to the coding style itself which uses clear descriptive names for functions and a clear syntax. Furthermore the editor is restricted to 30 lines of code, keeping all code always visible. Mercury provides the performer with an extensive library of algorithms to generate or transform numbersequences that can modulate parameters, such as melody and rhythm, over time. The environment produces sound in conjunction with visuals. Besides looking at the code, the audience is also looking at the visuals that are reactive to the sound or generated by the sound.

It is named after te planet Mercury. Mercury rules the creation and expression of our mental processes. The planet implores us to express ourselves. Mercury is about a quick wit, quick thinking. It lets us move from one thing to the next.

Mercury is programmed in the Cycling'74 Max8 node-based creative coding environment, as an abstracted layer on the Max/MSP audio engine and with the use of Node4Max for parsing, lexing and generative algorithms and Jitter/OpenGL for the visuals and the responsive texteditor.

Mercury uses the Total Serialism NodeJS package available on npmjs.com. This package contains an extensive library of algorithmic composition methods.

🎮 Features Overview

Quick access to playback of samples and change timing and tempo of samples or synthesizers

set tempo 89

new sample kick_909 time(1/4)
new sample hat_909 time(3/16)

Make rhythmic patterns with sequences of numbers and probabilities

ring loBeat [1 0 0 1 0.5]
ring hiBeat [0 1 0.2 0]

new sample tabla_lo time(1/8) play(loBeat)
new sample tabla_hi time(1/8) play(hiBeat)

Generate psuedorandom melodic content for a synthesizer in a range and set a scale

set scale minor d
set randomSeed 31415

ring melody random(16 0 24)

new synth saw note(melody) time(1/16) shape(4 100)

Design sounds with various effects

new sample chimes time(2) speed(-0.25) fx(reverb 0.3 15) fx(drive 10) fx(lfo 1/8 sine)

Easily give multiple instruments the same effects

new sample chimes time(2)
new sample harp_down time(3)
new sample gong_lo time(5)

set all fx(lfo 1/16) fx(delay) fx(reverb 0.5 11)

Generate sequences algorithmically to compose complex structures and choose from an extensive library of algorithms to work with

set scale minor a 

ring rhythm euclidean(32 13)

ring melody spread(5 0 24)
ring melody palinedrome(melody)
ring melody clone(melody 0 5 7 3)
ring melody lace(melody melody)

new synth triangle note(melody 1) shape(1 80) play(rhythm)

Control external midi devices or send midi to other applications and use clock sync

set midi getPorts
//=> prints the available devices to the console
new midi "Your Awesome Midi Device" time(1/4) note(7 1) length(100) sync(on)

Control other environments via OSC-messages

ring params [0.25 0.5 0.75]

new emitter osc address(yourDevice) theParam(params) time(1/4)

// emits => /yourDevice/theParam 0.25
//          /yourDevice/theParam 0.5
//          /yourDevice/theParam 0.75
//          /yourDevice/theParam 0.25
//          etc...

Easily control parameters in Mercury via external OSC-messages

new synth triangle fx(reverb /extOSC/verbAmount) fx(filter low /extOSC/cutoff 0.4) time(1) shape(1 1000)

AND MANY MORE (TO COME...)

🔭 Vision / Goals

Provide creatives with a quick and hands-on coding environment/language to expres, communicate and improvise livecoded works.
Use the environment as a teaching tool for:
- introduction to (electronic) music
- algorithmic composition
- sequencing and pattern generating
- sound design
- creative coding and live coding
Provide creatives with an hands-on language to create realtime processes
- code sound and music
- code visuals and let them react to sound
Provide creatives with an extensive library of algorithmic composition techniques
- released as a seperate Node Package titled Total-Serialism
- included in the Mercury environment through Node4Max
Provide creatives with a multi-purpose non-linear-sequencer
- use OSC to communicate with other platforms
- use MIDI to communicate with other platforms and devices
Provide creatives with an easy sampler/synthesizer for sounddesign and composition
- use external OSC to control parameters in the sampler/synthesis
- use external MIDI devices and messages to play the sampler/synthesizers (coming soon...)
Release a browser version and standalone Electron app, making getting started easier
Collaborate in Mercury via the browser with Flok and code music together
Extending the Mercury users-community and including extensions on the environment in the master-branch

⭐️ watch and star this repo to keep up-to-date with the latest changes whenever they're made

👩‍💻👨‍💻 Collaborative Coding

You can code together in Mercury using the amazing Flok live coding environment in the browser. The easiest way to get started is by combining Flok with the Mercury Playground, but you can also combine Flok with the Mercury Max8 version.

Start coding together here

💻 Install

🤓 I'll just download and figure it out myself

$ cd ~/Documents/Max\ 8/Projects
$ git clone http://github.com/tmhglnd/mercury
$ cd mercury
$ open mercury_ide/mercury_ide.maxproj

⚠ Troubleshooting

It could be that you are having issues with Mercury. Please follow the steps below:

Open the Troubleshooting

⌨️ External Editor

Instead of using the editor built in the Max Mercury version you can also load an external textfile or use a plugin for Pulsar (previously Atom).

📖 Documentation

Full explanation of all the possibilities in Mercury:

Open the documentation

💻 System Requirements

These system requirements are recommended to install and run Max and Mercury on your computer. Lower specs may work but it's not guaranteed. A dedicated Graphics Card (GPU) is also recommended to run the visual side of Mercury smoothly (the text-editor runs on the graphics card as well).

OS	CPU	RAM
Mac OSX 10.13 (at least 10.11.6+)	Intel i5 processor	8 GB
Windows 10 (7 or 8 may work)	Intel i5 or AMD mult-core processor	8 GB

🎵 Sounds

Most sounds in Mercury are downloaded from freesound.org and are licensed with Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons 0 licenses. If not downloaded from freesound it is made sure that the license allows to redistribute the sounds via the Mercury environment and that you can use them in your projects. A list of all the available sounds and the original sample can be found here:

List of sounds and credits

🔍 Further reading

👾 Made with Mercury

📝 Contribute

Contributions to the Mercury environment are much appreciated in whatever form they come! You can contribute in any of the following ways:

Add suggestions, bugs or feature-requests to the issues
Make additions or changes to the Documentation, Tutorials, Examples and any other text in this repository
Adjust the source code or make bugfixes and add features by forking and sending a pull request (see the Guidelines)

In order to make changes to various types of source code files you will need the following:

patchers - Requires Max8 environment and license to edit/modify/save the patchers of this project.
JS code - Requires a standard code-editor (eg. VSCode or Atom) to edit/modify/save the JS code.
GenExpr Code - Requires a standard code-editor (eg. VSCode or Atom) to edit/modify/save the GenExpr code.

Guidelines

In order to receive your contribution please follow these steps:

Fork this repository (click fork in the top right)
Clone the repository to your computer git clone https://github.com/<this-is-you>/<forked-repo>.git
Branch the Fork git checkout -b <name-your-branch>
Make any changes/additions to the code or docs
Add, commit and push your changes git add . git commit -a git push origin <your-branch-name>
Go to your forked repo in the browser and click compare & pull request, then create pull request
Please add a comment to clarify what you did and why

All steps with examples and images

🔋 Powered By

Mercury has been granted funding from Creative Industries Fund NL
Mercury has been granted in-kind funding from Creative Coding Utrecht

🙏 Thanks

Roald van Dillewijn for working together on osc and midi functionalities combined with his Digilog modified guitar-pedals
Guillem Gongora Moral for using Mercury as a composition tool and sharing valuable feedback in the process
Anne Veinberg for working with Mercury and a Mercury extensions for the CodeKlavier project
Rafaele Maria Andrade for collaboration on networked performance between Mercury and Knurl
Repo banner image by Annebel Bunt
Live performance image by Zuzanna Zgierska

✨ Inspiration

During the development of Mercury (both the playground and the full version) I've found inspiration in many other live coding environments, practices and other platforms. Some of these are:

Hydra - Live coding visual synthesizer by Olivia Jack
Sema - Live coding language design platform combined with Machine Learning
MIMIC Project - a web platform for the artistic exploration of musical machine learning and machine listening.
Tidal - Live coding of patterns
Sonic Pi - The live coding synth for everyone
Tone.js - Webaudio framework for programming synths and sequencers
Nearley - Parsing toolkit

📄 Licenses

Main Source - The GNU GPL v.3 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2023
Sound Files - Individually licensed, listed under media/README.md
Documentation - The CC BY-SA 4.0 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2023
Examples - The CC BY-SA 4.0 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2023

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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