Xavier Riley

Xavier Riley

PhD researcher looking at automatic music transcription, also a jazz guitarist and double bassist

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Compiling packages from source on Heroku using buildpacks

3 minute read

Published:

(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)

Using OpenVPN from a Heroku dyno

1 minute read

Published:

(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)

10,000 hours - as told by jazz musicians

4 minute read

Published:

In a 1993 paper by Anders Ericsson, he was one of the first to make the claim that mastery of a skill took around 10 years (about 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice.

Writing a C extension for Ruby in 2016

10 minute read

Published:

Now that Ruby has crested the hype cycle, settled down and taken out a mortgage, you’d expect the posts around the community to be more about big business concerns. Whilst that might be true, I’d like to row against the tide by telling you about the fun I had figuring out how to write my first C extension - fast_osc - and how I made Sonic Pi 10x faster in the process.

Neutron Accelerators and Drum Machines with Sonic Pi

8 minute read

Published:

Working with Sonic Pi one of the exciting things about being able to code music is the potential for using algorithms. For the non-technical reader, I like to think of algorithms like following a recipe. You might start with the same ingredients but the order in which you do things can affect to outcome.

Getting data from PDFs with JRuby

2 minute read

Published:

There are many solutions for getting data from pdfs. I’m going to describe how to use the excellent Java library PDFTextStream by Chas Emerick (of Clojure fame) to get data out of tricky pdfs.

portfolio

publications

talks

Coding Music: As easy as Pi

Published:

Had a speaker slot at the WXG web conference in Guildford. Presented an introduction to programming music with Sonic Pi in which I demo a few of my experiments. The video/audio didn’t come out too well but the talk was well received I think.

Live Coding in the Classroom

Published:

Co-presented talk on Sonic Pi with the lead developer Sam Aaron. I think the original video has been taken down now but my bit is here:

Bath Ruby 2015: Lightning Talk

Published:

Lightning “talk” in which I managed to do no talking! A 5 minute live coded piece starting from scratch, with sampled voices from the other Bath Ruby presenters.