[linux-audio-user] live coding of music

Dave Griffiths dave at pawfal.org
Mon Oct 11 10:41:18 EDT 2004


On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 19:05, M P Smoak wrote:
> On Thursday 07 October 2004 06:09, Dave Griffiths wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > With the talk of text based studios (great site btw, Julien) I
> > thought I'd mention http://www.toplap.org which is devoted to
> > the practice of programming music and art live, in front of an
> > audience.
> 
> Good topic, Dave.  One I'm very interested in as a player (sax,
> flute, keyboard), teacher and sometimes programmer.  The first
> demo of computer generated sound that I saw was at the Museum
> of Modern Art about 1970, I think.  

was this demo using livecoding techniques? do you have any more info on
this - we're trying to document the history of livecoding here:
http://www.toplap.org/?HistoricalPerformances and the earliest we have
is 1985 at STEIM Amsterdam

> I was out of music during
> the 70's, but was very impressed by a solo alto sax player in
> a club in Oakland about 1976; young woman who had made her on
> backups onto cassette tapes.  Good player, good taste and 
> simple presentation that worked for the player and the crowd.
> 
> >
> > Ok, so it's not strictly linux based, but the applications
> > used include Alex Mclean's feedback.pl:
> > http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/08/31/livecode.html lots of
> > supercollider, using jitlib:
> > http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/566 and some
> > stuff I've written: http://www.pawfal.org/Software/fluxus/
> > which are all running on linux.
> >
> > The text based nature of the interfaces tend to lead to more
> > flexibility rather than less. The idea is to project the code
> > as part of the performance to allow the audience to see the
> > relationship between the code and the music - and remove the
> > "are they just checking email"  syndrome :) )
> 
> Strongly agree on the flexibility of interactive text interfaces.
> And on the idea of projecting the code as part of the performance 
> to expand what the audience sees or hears, with text to speach
> conversion.  

text to speech is something we've yet to try - synching the words to the
beat would be pretty fun (although possibly harder to understand than a
projection) :)

> In 1992, I saw a great presentation by Stanley Jordan on using 
> APL in music performance and teaching at the APL92 conference
> at Stanford.  It caused me to start looking into music on the pc
> and now at last I have a very good linux machine with audio 
> (PlanetCCRMA) and apl (APLX) working.  I just installed apl last 
> week so not sure yet how to interface apl with pccrma, but I bet 
> it ain't that hard. 

apl looks interesting - again, do you have any more details about how
it's been used for audio programming?

another audio livecoding system to check out that I really should have
mentioned is ChucK: http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

cheers!

dave




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