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🌕 Mercury Live Coding Environment

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

💬 Join the Discord Community!

Livecoding Performance with Mercury (photo: Zuzanna Zgierska)

📋 Table of Contents

📟 About

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.

Screenshot of the Mercury environment

🎮 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

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

👩‍💻👨‍💻 Collaborative Coding

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.

💻 Install

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

⚠ Troubleshooting

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

⌨️ 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 documentation of everything you can do in Mercury:

🎵 Sounds

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.

🔍 Further reading

A list of other reading material and inspiration

👾 Made with Mercury

Made something with Mercury? Please add a URL here and send a pull request! 😎

See the full list here

Small selection

📝 Contribute

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

Please follow the steps here

🔋 Powered By

🙏 Thanks

✨ 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 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

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.