Hive as of Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium 2014
About: Hive is a mini audio programming language built over SuperCollider. The language is meant to be a platform for novice users to begin learning about musical programming, live coding, and provide enough of a starter curiosity to explore the SuperCollider language even further.
Hive is a foundational language, and users learn about several different things. Users learn about keys, pitches, relative pitch relations, harmony, notes, and tempo. In working with Hive users are shielded from audio programming directly, for example users do not need to name a sine oscillator, or make a graph of unit generators, but they have the ability to change and choose the envelops of a preset instrument, the root of that instrument, and the notes being played. Hive exposes intervals, tempo, and layering as musical variables that people can play with.
From a coding standpoint users become comfortable with writing function and method calls, and from here get comfortable with changing parameters of those calls. Hive has taken away all other elements of working with code, and concentrates solely on writing functions and method calls to provide a simple and clean starter notation for novice users.
The system ability of Hive includes the ability of users to manage four layers of sound. These four layers are essentially executed by booting four preset instruments: melody, harmony, bass, and texture. Users can specify sequences of notes in relative pitch notation, change the root of the sequence of pitches, and change the tempo. Users can also shift up or down the root of a sequence of pitches, and stop and start instruments. Users can also add and change the envelope of each instrument based on five presets with specified attack and release times, they are called: short, long, rev, perc, and tri. Lastly, users can evaluate a basic help method to begin working with the language if they are confused on where to begin.
To begin working with Hive, please view the following beginners tutorial at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dqpcBFdEisv52H6OSVTkph4wHgUVEKb1Pt-xvKaafBY/pub