rukano

I haven’t posted anything in the last weeks, so here’s some live coding practice I did this night trying some new stuff I saw on the SC users list. Basically nothing new, but it makes the workflow easier when playing with Pbind or similar with SynthDefs but also in the ProxySpace. Basically the PatternStreamPlayer has to be somewhere in the NodeProxy chain but it has to be played externally:

~node = Pbind();
~node.play

Maybe like that it will set the outputs to the right buses? Anyway, using

~node = Pbind().play

didn’t worked (well it worked, but one can’t route the signal of that pattern player to other nodes or filter it via ProxyChain. Anyway, here is the result. I forgot to turn on the History, so you’ll have to conform with the result only.

EDIT:  I also uploaded a second part a little bit more “beaty”. Hope you like it.

I was jamming with some friends yesterday and exploring some sound until I got to play and record buffers live and use them as sound material. Of course this isn’t new, but I was very impressed by the easy of use for a live environment. One could just sing the degree which one want’s and that’s it. The sound material is also more interesting than the easy standard sound I usually use and well, the rhytmic can be complemented from within SC. Anyway, just wanted to share this file because I liked the sound of it. The code is in my GIT repository, but sadly not as a History file, so you just get the final result and not the whole process.

Trying to improve my live coding skills. I still code too slow, but I’m quite happy with the results.  Specially this one, I thought it was kind of nice to use audio in for faster changing sounds without having to rewrite the whole function. Here the History log. If interested you can look at the date and search for the other two or three tests I was doing. I was mostly trying to understand the UGenPatterns and other stuff. Sadly my NPdef and NPxdef still won’t work and nobody in the list actually has time to resolve the problem. I tried already myself but I donÄt get a result changing methods and so on. I hope it’ll work again soon, because I loved that not having to “.asSynthDef(name:\bla).store” the Node function every time I changed the source to control this from a lang-sided Pattern. For the moment to remake this behavior I relay on Tdef’s and Demand UGens, but the last ones won’t synchronize as easy and comfortable as the Patterns and Tasks.

Anyway, History & Git are showing to be are really easy way to publish the code to the repository and from there to my site. Audio examples are going to be more selective due to the space and uploading times.

Hi, I wrote a couple of action into menu items for my SuperCollider and now I can publish my exercises with 2-3 clicks! I’m pushing all this logged session into the live code folder in my SC code GitHub repository. So if you are interested… I’m not yet publishing the music, maybe I’ll modify all the process so I can start History and the recording and so on, but there’s still the disk space problem. The audio files are too big and my server is not that big to support daily 20-40 MB… so… I was thinking about the possibility of using one of those music hosting sites like SoundCloud or something like that, but that would be for the future. For the moment I’ll be happy to be able to record the history and publish it from SuperCollider and that easy. If you are interested in the menu items, you can see the code here but probably you’ll have to modify it, and don’t forget, this should be in the startup file so you have these items in your menu every time you start SuperCollider.

I mentioned already in the last post the work nx001_LiveCode by Miquel Parera. I couldn’t resist and write about this work a little bit longer because every time I hear this I can’t believe it’s just improvised code. Besides the music, the openness of this project is also amazing. The code is readable, created with the History class in SuperCollider and the samples also downloadable. There is nothing left one can wish for, except maybe more artwork or videos

I also think using FreeSound.org as an open platform for these free samples and Google documents for the code is a great idea to use this open services to share all this with the word. I started a few days ago also a kind of tool to facilitate the recording and publishing of live coding sessions. When I try to practice at home, sometimes one is too lazy or one can forget to turn on the History or the Server was turned on for recording but maybe one forget to click again to start the recording…. Also the recordings managing is tedious, and linking it with the History document is not a big deal, but hey, if one is going to be doing this more often, why not automate this? I think that won’t be the biggest problem. I could maybe rely on the engine of a friends tool to manage recordings (basic editing, compressing and mailing) and just add the history linking and instead of mailing, publishing to an FTP address in a directory with the current date. I mean, one can do all this manually, but I thought computer were also for facilitating and speeding up this kind of repetitive tasks.

So as I said it’s just an idea. I haven’t started it already, because maybe I’ll wait for the “RecordingManager” (don’t worry π I’m not trying to stress you) and take it as a model. It’s a very nice job, even if it’s still unpublished.

Anyway, I can just recommend this work and see and hear what live coding is and take advantage of this ‘openness’ and see and try to understand how it was done.

Some weeks ago the SuperCollider and livecoding mailing lists were quite active talking about this article in the BBC.

I personally, not being a big live coder to talk about this theme, see some positive things about in all this. Not only the article, but the scene in general. The only thing I still don’t like from the BBC side are the journalists, why do they always try to be so funny when they talk about things they don’t even know? I could sense some ‘joke’ in the tone of this woman in the video like: “yeah, don’t know what livecoding is, but I thing you have to be a ‘freak’ to do this crazy stuff”. Anyway, it’s just my subjective opinion about this interviewer.

I was quite happy to see some people on the screen I normally only see their names in the e-mail list. And really, the scene is evolving at a fast pace, so that people can say anymore: “live coding, yeah, but it’s always so ‘shitty’ music”. One example is the recently published work by Miquel Parera nx001_LiveCode. It was all done with the JitLib in SuperCollider and just some editing in Audacity. Hearing the music without knowing the process done is as interesting as viewing the code he also published on his site.

It’s going to be interesting the next few years in the developing of this ‘on the go’ programming for music. Impromptu 2.0 also recently published is also strongly orientated for this, using LLVM and practically compiling DSP code on the fly.

Live coding has also some disadvantages, but hey… this is quite a newborn, so we have to give it a little bit more time to mature. But at the moment one can see and hear some amazing examples an performances in YouTube.