# Overtone

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Overtone and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Clojure library for live music coding, praised for fun and easy first use. Caveat: the dev environment is fiddly and fragile.

## Why people recommend it

- Fun for live music coding (4 comments): "Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355889)) "I remember having great fun playing with it at a Clojure meetup in about 2011." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532890)) "folks are playing music while manipulating some code in their editors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239386))
- Simple and easy to use (2 comments): "its pretty simple and easy to use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954793)) "on first try this is awesome" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949603))
- Works with Emacs and Clojure (3 comments): "Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355889)) "He even used to perform using emacs before he created Sonic Pi." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49254226)) "a nice Clojure front-end (with some Emacs integration)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008734))
- Graph-based music exploration (2 comments): "makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947802)) "the subgraph expansion is really slick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329890))

## What people warn about

- Fiddly, fragile dev environment setup (1 comments): "Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920586))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Overtone", https://hackerapproved.com/p/overtone/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).