Welcome to Mercury! ✌️ ☮️ Make Music, Not War! ☮️ ✌️
Mercury is a free/open-source, beginner-friendly, minimal and human-readable language for the live coding of algorithmic electronic music 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 version:
git clone https://github.com/tmhglnd/mercury.git
👾 Start coding directly in the playground! (recommended for beginners)
🙏 Support Mercury by buying me a coffee ko-fi
- 📟 Mercury?
- 🎮 What can I do with Mercury?
- 👩💻 Code together with others!
- 🚀 Let's get started!
- 🔎 Read more
- 👾 Hear what others made
- 🤓 I like to help
- 🔋 Powered By
- 🙏 Thanks
- ✨ Inspiration
- 📄 Licenses
Mercury is a free/open-source, beginner-friendly, 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.
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
list loBeat [1 0 0 1 0.5]
list 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
list 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
list rhythm euclidean(32 13)
list melody spread(5 0 24)
list melody palinedrome(melody)
list melody clone(melody 0 5 7 3)
list 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
list 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...)
⭐️ watch and star this repo to keep up-to-date with the latest changes whenever they're made
You can code together in Mercury by using the amazing Flok live coding environment for the browser developed by Damián Silvani (a.k.a. Munshkr). Flok is a web-based P2P collaborative editor for live coding music and graphics. Similar to Etherpad, but focused on code evaluation for livecoding.
OR
- 🤓 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
It could be that you are having issues with Mercury. Please follow the steps below:
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).
Full documentation of everything you can do in Mercury:
Most of the sounds in Mercury are 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 you to redistribute the sounds via the Mercury environment and that you can use them in your projects. All the sounds are listed below with their original source, license and credits.
A list of other reading material and inspiration
Made something with Mercury? Please add a URL here and send a pull request! 😎
- iTypeMusic - Electronic Music Stream with Live Coding
- LXT @levoxtrip (at Solstice Stream December 2023)
- Linalab(Mercury) + Turbulente(p5Live) - Live at Algorave Lisbon
- T.mo - Liber Abaci (Mercury Coding Sessions)
- Roald van Dillewijn - Smashing Temparateness (Mercury Coding Sessions)
- Guillem Góngora Moral - Transcription #1 (Mercury Coding Sessions)
- Anne Veinberg - CodeKlavier meets Mercury (Mercury Coding Sessions)
- Nick Levantis - Wake Up
Contributions to the Mercury environment are much appreciated in whatever form they come! You can contribute in any many ways!
- Mercury has been granted funding from Creative Industries Fund NL
- Mercury has been granted in-kind funding from Creative Coding Utrecht
- Lina Bautista for working together on developing functionalities in Mercury to control modular synths via cv
- SEMA/MIMIC project team (Thor Magnusson, Chris Kiefer and Francisco Bernardo) for their awesome full week workshop at Sussex University in Brighton on designing a live coding language in the browser combined with machine learning
- 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
- Live performance image by Zuzanna Zgierska
During the development of Mercury (both the playground and the full version) I've found inspiration in many other live coding environments, practices and 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
- Main Source - The GNU GPL v.3 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2024
- Sound Files - Individually licensed, listed under Sounds in Mercury
- Documentation - The CC BY-SA 4.0 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2024
- Examples - The CC BY-SA 4.0 License (c) Timo Hoogland 2019-2024
- Max8 - Proprietary Software, Max (c) 1990-2024 Cycling'74 / IRCAM All rights reserved
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.