11 Oct
2004
11 Oct
'04
4:27 p.m.
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. 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.
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.
As an aside, some of you might be interested in looking at APLX
not so much as a language but to how well it is done for linux,
mac and windows. Very easy install and excellent documentation
on not just how to install it, but how and why to use it. My
biggest difficulty with linux programs has been finding info
on the "why folks use program Z" and "how to use it".
See also the paper "Live Algorithm Programming and a Temporary
Organisation for its Promotion" here:
http://www.toplap.org/?Read_Me_Paper
cheers!
dave
Just recently heard about a performance here, by a solo guitar
player from New York who came in, setup and generated his backups
for several tunes live; explaining how was part of show. Wish I
had known about in time to attend. What we can do now is almost
unbelieveable to me.
Thanks for the links; looks like I have have some reading to do.
Sure I'll enjoy it.
Marv in Lex, KY looking at beautiful leaves under Fall sun.