Complete Tutorial
POMSKI is a Python-based live-coding environment for real-time MIDI composition. Write and rewrite patterns while the music plays — no stopping, no rendering, no waiting.
Download and install from the GitHub repo for POMSKI: Here
01 — Philosophy
Most music software asks you to build first, then listen. You place notes on a grid, render an audio file, press play, realise something is wrong, go back to the grid. The feedback loop is slow, and the act of composition is disconnected from the act of listening.
POMSKI inverts this. You write a few lines of Python, press Shift+Enter, and the change
takes effect on the very next bar — while everything else keeps playing. The music is always
running. You are always inside it.
Live coding is a practice borrowed from computer science performance art (the Algorave scene, SuperCollider, TidalCycles). Its central insight is that code is notation — a precise, expressive language for describing musical pattern. Unlike a piano roll, code can describe not just a specific sequence of notes but the rules that generate a sequence: mathematical systems, probability, chaos, feedback loops.
The key shift
In a DAW you compose a performance. In POMSKI you perform a composition. The score and the concert are the same event.
http://localhost:8080 lets you see patterns, mute channels, monitor signals, and run REPL commands without touching the terminal.