Hi there, I'm Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi and now I’m also building Tau5 - a next-gen creative coding platform for making music, visuals, and interactive art with friends and/or AI, all in perfect sync. If you believe in tools that put creativity first, join me here on Patreon or over on GitHub Sponsors and be part of the first wave in September 2025.
Let me guess. You're reading this because either one or more of the following are true:
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You're a curious and creative programmer
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You're curious about programming creatively
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You're generally a curious soul
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You're one of the many wonderfully kind supporters of my work on Sonic Pi here on Patreon (hi, and thanks! ❤️)
I'm building Tau5 for you and your future creative coding self/band/group/crew/enter-collective-noun-here.
Born from decades of building, maintaining, and developing live coding tools, Tau5 is built on deep technical experience and a strong motivation to empower solo creators and new artistic communities - from local jam crews to online collectives - to express themselves together through code.
In plain language
Tau5 will be a friendly yet powerful creative coding platform that lets you and your friends and even AI agents jam together in real time by writing code that drives sound, visuals and a wide variety of connected devices such as MIDI synths - all staying perfectly in sync.
For those who enjoy technical jargon:
Tau5 will be a creative coding native/web platform for secure, event-driven, concurrent, hot-swappable, deterministic & precisely-timed distributed computation. Features include a native GUI, remote browser UI, LAN discovery/mesh, central server global sync & a sandboxed local MCP server both for AI agents and any programming language with an MCP client.
It will ship in three different forms:
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Tau5 Desktop - a stand-alone native app (with built-in server) for Windows, macOS & Linux. Perfect for underground bunker performances with no network connectivity.
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Tau5 Server - a background server for Linux with a web UI. Each Tau5 Server node can auto-discover other Tau5 Server and Desktop nodes on the local network to form a synchronised mesh. Perfect for your studio or art installations.
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Tau5 Live - a public-facing web server supporting independent and collaborative use, also enabling centralised coordination between Tau5 nodes (https://tau5.live )
Remember those late-night coding sessions where you wished for a collaborator who never sleeps? Tau5 includes an optional built-in MCP server that lets AI agents like Claude Code become full creative partners. Imagine saying "make this bassline dirtier" or "add some chaos to the visuals" and watching your AI bandmate respond in real-time, live coding alongside you. Not replacing human creativity - amplifying it.
Oh, but AI is not for me.
Not only is the MCP server optional it also doubles as a powerful programmable entry point for any programming language with an MCP client library - not just AI agents.
To be clear, there is no AI built into Tau5 - it just knows how to talk fluently with your AI agent.
A brief aside. I truly believe the best software comes directly from the heart and mind for the hearts and minds of others. This is why most business software is so bland - it's a financial transaction - it pretty much always comes from a cash transaction between companies/corporations and the programmers they hire and is purely for extracting profit. The hearts and minds of people are rarely in the picture, and when there are such as programmers that care, they so often get burned out and set aside. I know, I've been there.
I've been dreaming about Tau5 for many years now. My dream is for Tau5 to be a tool to enable us to connect and express ourselves through creative programming. A tool to express your heart and mind.
"OK, that sounds lovely, but what actually is Tau5? How might it help me express and nourish my soul?"
What a lovely question. Tau5 is currently three things. It's my dream, it's a technical foundation and it's a journey I'd love for you to join me on.
"OK, OK, this still sounds lovely, but it's starting to sound like fluffy vapourware - dreams from a dreamer aren't tangible or real."
Ah, I agree, but I'm a dreamer with an incredibly strong technical background with decades of experience building powerful tools for expression. I co-created Overtone a powerful live coding music environment, Quil a novel language front-end to Processing that was the first to enable live modification of Processing sketches and more recently Sonic Pi - the most widely used live coding music software for education.
I'm not messing about - Tau5 is the culmination of my experiences developing and maintaining all of these well-loved tools. I have a strong history of shipping real software that works. The question isn't whether or not Tau5 will ship. It will. The question is when and how.
Around 6 years ago I started adding visual programming and other creative extensions to Sonic Pi but ultimately came to the conclusion that Sonic Pi wasn't the correct technical foundation for these ideas. I decided that Sonic Pi already has its sweet-spot - it's an amazingly mature, stable and reliable tool for performing live music and for teaching computing.
Stretching Sonic Pi beyond this felt like trying to turn a skateboard into a mountain bike. The result might have been something Sam Pilgrim would have been happy to ride, but it just didn't feel right in my gut. So I started experimenting with new architectures and technologies.
Sonic Pi will continue to be developed and maintained in tandem with Tau5. You can see Sonic Pi as the mature and stable platform you can rely on whilst Tau5 is a new experimental playground for exploring new ideas.
Tau5 and Sonic Pi already share a lot of code and architecture and this will only increase in time. Much of the development of Tau5 will flow directly back to benefit Sonic Pi and vice versa.
Supporting Tau5 will support Sonic Pi.
I'm not building Tau5 to replace your favourite tools - I'm building it to jam with them. Ableton Link, MIDI, and OSC are already baked into the existing technical foundation (functionality shared with Sonic Pi). Tau5 is designed to be flexible enough to fit naturally into whatever creative flow you've already got going.
Maybe you're running Ableton and want to live-code some generative melodies on top. Tau5 locks to Ableton's clock via Link, sends MIDI to your hardware synths, and when your collaborator jumps into your Tau5 session - either locally or from anywhere in the world - they're instantly locked to your tempo too. No fuss, it just works.
Imagine TidalCycles or a hardware sequencer sending rhythmic patterns to Tau5 via OSC or MIDI. Tau5 receives these events, using them to generate reactive visuals while simultaneously routing control messages to Resolume or TouchDesigner - all perfectly in sync. Hot-swap your code mid-performance without dropping a beat. Your audience won't know you just fixed that bug, they'll just feel the flow.
Tau5 is Open Source and the developers amongst you can track progress over on GitHub: https://github.com/samaaron/tau5. However, for at least the first year, signed pre-built releases will only be available to supporters. This means supporters get easy-to-install binaries initially for Windows and macOS with Flatpak and/or AppImage builds for Linux planned for the future.
The full source is always open for those who want to build from scratch.
Rather than jump straight into the user experience, years of developing and maintaining Sonic Pi taught me that world-class developer tools that focus on live observability make a critical difference to development speed, quality, sustainability and ultimately happiness.
I have therefore spent the last few months building both a strong technical foundation and complementary developer tools.
These exist today.
For the lovely curious developer-minded of you out there, these tools currently include:
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Built-in REPL for the server
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Chromium web inspector for the GUI
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Live dashboard enabling deep observation of server activity
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Live GUI log
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Live server log
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Multiple MCP servers that provide tools for AI agents such as Claude Code deep introspection and live control of the server, the Chromium-based GUI and the platform runtime
Together these represent the kind of rich and powerful developer tools that I wish I had integrated into Sonic Pi from its inception. They are already making Tau5 development more fun.
I've built the foundation - the architecture is solid, the dev tools are comprehensive. But turning this foundation into the creative platform of my dreams requires full-time focus.
Without sustainable funding, Tau5 remains my dream instead of our reality.
Every Patreon supporter isn't just funding development - you're securing your seat in the first wave of this new creative movement.
If you're curious, sign up for free to watch this unfold. If you want early access to signed releases and tau5.live become a paid supporter here Patreon or on GitHub Sponsors.
Regular development updates will start immediately, then September brings the first release - the smallest, simplest thing that does something interesting. Become part of the Tau5 journey and your feedback can help shape what Tau5 becomes.