Tag: live blog

Live Blogging the Sc Symposium – Flocking by Colin Clark

Flocking – audio synthesis in javascript on the web

flockingjs.org
github/colinbdclark/flocking

audio synthesis framework written in javascript

specifically intended to support artists

Inspired by SC

Web is everywhere

programming environments that have graphical tools

Flocking is highly declarative

Synth graphs declares trees of names unit generators – you write data strictures, not code

Data is easy to manipulate

flock.synth({
  synthDef: {
    ugen: "flock.ugen.sinOsc",
    freq: 440
    mul: 0.25
  }
})

He skips the Rate:”audio” because that’s the default.
Modulation:

flock.synth({
  synthDef: {
    ugen: "flocl.ugen.sinOsc",
    freq: 440
    mul: {
      ugen:flock.ugen.line"
....
  }
})

It handles buffers and whatnot, but not multichannel expansion.
Scheduling is unreliable…but works

Republic

It’s time for everybody’s favourite collaborative real time network live coding tool for SuperCollider.
Invented by PowerBooks UnPlugged – granular synthesis playing across a bunch of unplugged laptops.
Then some of them started Republic111, which is named for the room number where the workshop where they taught stuff.
Code reading is interesting in network msic partly because of stealing, but also to understand somebody else’s code quickly, or actively understand it by changing it. Live coding is a public or collective thinking action.
If you evaluate code, it shows up in a history file, and gets sent to everybody else in the Republic. You can stop the sound of everybody on the network. All the SynthDefs are saved. People play ‘really equally’ on everybody’s computer. Users don’t feel obligated to act, but rather to respond. Participants spend most of their time listening
Republic is mainly one big class, which is a weakness and should be broken up into smaller classes hat can be used separately. Scott Wilson is working on a newer versions which on github. Look up ‘The Way things May Go on Vimeo’.
Graham and Jonas have done a system which allows you to see a map of who is emitting what sound and you can click on it and get the Tdef that made it.
Scott is putting out a call for participation and discussion about how it should be.

Cyber-physical programming in Extempore – Andrew Sorensen

Cybernetics is a cyber physical system – any closed loop control system.
Cyberphsysical programming is one of these but with a programmer stuck in the loop. The programmer is above the loop and in the loop. Coupling of human, machine and environment.
By changing the world, we understand the world better.
Real-time, real-time. Writing in real-time on a real-time system.
Giant radio telescope is in the works in Australia. they will have huge anoubts of data to deal within real-time.

Extempore

This is a high performance computing thing for real time. It tries to analyse code to figure out how long it’s going to run. Supports embedded computing.
xtlang is a subversion of this? Everything is hot swappable.
It’s a member of the lisp family. Sort of. static typing. No garbage collection. It’s fast and determinate – it will always run at the same speed every time you run it.
This a systems language that feels like a dynamic language. You think you’re doing lisp, but it’s all cyber-physical.

Questions

How old is this language? 2.5 years.
What did the code look like for the example of it’s use in the video he showed? There are online examples.
… this talk was somewhat over my head, as are many of the questions….
Is the compiler written in Extempore? Not yet. It’s in scheme right now.

Benjamin Graf – mblght

Lighting guys sit behind lighting desks and hit buttons for the duration of concerts, so lights in shows are actually usually boring, despite having valuable and variable equipment.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could do stochastic lights with envelope controls?
SuperCollider does solid timing and has support for different methods of dispersing stuff and has flexible signal routing.
He’s got an object that holds descriptions of the capabilities of any lighting fixture – moving, colour, on, off, etc.
He uses events in the pattern system as one way of changing stuff.
He’s added light support to the Server. So you can do SinOsc control of light changes, sendint to contorl busses. He’s also made light UGens.
He ended up live coding the lights for a festival.

Questions

What about machine listening? It would be easy to do in this system.
The code is on github.

David Ogborn: EspGrid

In Canada, laptop orchestras get tones of gigs.
Naive sync methods: do redundant packet transmission – so send the same value several times in a row. This actually increases the chance of collision, but probably one will get through. Or you can schedule further in advance and schedule larger chunks – so send a measure instead of just sending a beat.
download it from esp.mcmasters.ca. mac only
5 design principles

  • Immediacy – launch it and you’ve got stuff going right away
  • Decentralisation – everything is peer to peer
  • Neutrality – works with chuck, supercollider, whatever
  • Hybridity – they can even use different software on the same computer at the same time
  • Extensibility – it can schedule arbitrary stuff

The grid has public and private parts. EspGrid communicates with other apps via localhost OSC. Your copy of supercollider does not talk to the larger network. EspGrid handles all that.
The “private protocol” is not osc. It’s going to use a binary format for transmission. Interoperability is thus only based on client software, not based on the middleware.
Because the Grid thing runs OSC to clients, it can run on a neighbour’s computer and send the osc messages to linux users or other unsupported OSes.
The program is largely meant to be run in the background. You can turn a beat on or off, and this is shared across the network. You can chat. You can share clipboards. Also, Chuck will dump stuff directly.
Arbitrary osc messages will be echoed out, with a time stamp. you can schedule them for the future.
You can publish papers on this stuff or use it to test shit for papers. Like swap sync methods and test which works best.
Reference Beacon does triangulation to figure out latencies.
He wants to add WAN stuff, but not change the UI, so the users won’t notice.

Question

Have they considered client/server topology for time sync? No. A server is a point of failure.
Security implications? He has not considered the possibility of sending naughty messages or how to stop them.
Licence? Some Open Source one… maybe GPL2. It’s on google code.

Chad McKinney – Lich.js – A Networked Audio / Visual Live Coding Language

They started with SuperCollider and have gone on from there. He’s into updates in browser technologies.
He decided to write a language first as a way to start live coding.
Uses web audio and web gl
This language is GPL2 and is on github
If you’re on Chrome, go mess with http://www.chadmckinneyaudio.com/Lich.js/Lich.html

Battery dying

Alex McLean

He did command line scripts 2001-2004, then started working in perl, the Haskell.
slub – writing code to make music to drink beer to.
Feedback.pl – writing code to write code to make music to drink beer to
He read Laurie Spiegel’s paper on manipulations of musical patterns, so he got into pattern languages (ie HMSL, Common music, SuperCollider)
Tidal is embedded in Haskell for pattern manipulation for music. Complexity through combination of simplicity.
Structures could be trees of structures…
So he moved to functions of time. Time is an integer. Give a Pattern a time and it gives you an integer and the periodicity. This is limited because time is an integer.
Now, he thinks of time as cyclic, with repetition. So make time a floating point instead of an int. But this makes lookups hard.
So the thought of having patterns be a sequence with discrete stuff or a signal, which is indexed by a rational and is non-discrete. However, mixing analog and digital in one data type is a problem.
So he made separate types, but then this caused massive code inflation.
He’s gone back to one type again.
Haskell is intense…..
and REALLY concise

Questions

Does the system have state? No, which means he can’t even have random numbers.
Is time still a loop in the current version? Notionally, yes. But representationally, it’s a number, just in the functions, so its what you make it.

Live Coding as Research

This is new stuff and it combines art and science. Plus you’ve got tons of outcomes including papers, performances, languages, theories, etc.
(thinking about music as research in terms of grant application criteria saps my will to live.)
You can do stuff based on perception – the speaker has used psychology studies as a basis for his work.
Gestalt psychology ideas he uses: grouping,continuation and closure.
He is only working on pitch and time
Pseduo-jazz fusion can be expressed through surprisingly short lisp expressions.
Gaussian probabilities do stuff around proximity, some range constraints and some directions.
Ordering of lists leads to closure.
Iteration is repetition
He wants to interact more with tech communities

Questions

Scott wants all his numbers. He’s about to publish in the CMJ.
Nick wants to know why he picked Gaussian. It’s good enough and it’s succinct. He’s being inspired by processes which are learned from modelling research.