Overtone
Hacker ApprovedMusic programming library in Developer tools
Clojure library for live music coding, praised for fun and easy first use. Caveat: the dev environment is fiddly and fragile.
Clojure library for live music coding, praised for fun and easy first use. Caveat: the dev environment is fiddly and fragile.
13 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fun for live music coding
“Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs”
Comment from 22 Dec 2025 on Hacker News “I remember having great fun playing with it at a Clojure meetup in about 2011.”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Sonic Pi” “folks are playing music while manipulating some code in their editors”
Comment from 12 Dec 2025 in “Emacs is my new window manager (2015)” - Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “Sonic Pi v5 Released”
Simple and easy to use
“its pretty simple and easy to use”
Comment from 10 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)” “on first try this is awesome”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)” Works with Emacs and Clojure
“Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs”
Comment from 22 Dec 2025 on Hacker News “He even used to perform using emacs before he created Sonic Pi.”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “Sonic Pi v5 Released” “a nice Clojure front-end (with some Emacs integration)”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Supercollider” Graph-based music exploration
“makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)” “the subgraph expansion is really slick”
Comment from 10 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Fiddly, fragile dev environment setup
“Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that.”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “In which Lisp generates music”
What people said
12 of the 15 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Misheard words is something that Overtone fixes.”
“I remember having great fun playing with it at a Clojure meetup in about 2011.”
“He even used to perform using emacs before he created Sonic Pi.”
“a nice Clojure front-end (with some Emacs integration)”
“Dev environment being fiddly and fragile is the biggest con, you need to put some effort upfront in that.”
“the subgraph expansion is really slick”
“It already runs pretty smoothly.”
“its pretty simple and easy to use”
“on first try this is awesome”
“makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph”
“Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs”
“folks are playing music while manipulating some code in their editors”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.