PC Lightsynths?

adam · Post by **adam** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 5:41 pm 0

indeed... the license for pd is very liberal, you can do pretty much what you like with the code...

msp uses code from pd circa 1997... jitter is heavily inspired by (that is to say based on) gridflow...

i've had a little play with gem, i'm slowly getting the hang of it, though it's a graphical programming language, it's got wrappers to pretty much every opengl function... i hear that some quite amazing stuff can be done with it (i've seen a few demos of noise being translated into a texture on a spinning cube in real time but thats small fry by the looks, you can do that with video too)

adam · Post by **adam** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 9:00 pm 0

had a quick (well downloading a livecd & burning it was slow) go on fluxus today, i got it to draw a cube onscreen

http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=FluxusNotes

i really like some of the examples... there's some "minter style feedback" on one picture

(towards the end of the page)

also looks like some bbc4 idents were made with a lightsynth of sorts.... http://www.glassworks.co.uk/search_arch ... bc4_ident/ don't know if this is old news.. haven't been round long enough..

koogy · Post by **koogy** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 11:13 am 0

adam wrote:had a quick (well downloading a livecd & burning it was slow) go on fluxus today, i got it to draw a cube onscreen ;-)

http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=FluxusNotes

i really like some of the examples... there's some "minter style feedback" on one picture ;-) (towards the end of the page)

have been to a gig where someone was using this as a background projection. bloke was re-programming it in real time, the source code appearing on a layer above the actual 3d images. oh, he has the same url as the software: http://www.pawfal.org/nebogeo/

adam wrote:also looks like some bbc4 idents were made with a lightsynth of sorts....

ha, i wrote to the bbc asking what these were made with but they couldn't tell me at the time. they were quite lovely, would respond to the announcers voice in realtime. they've stopped using it now though in favour of things that are much duller.

adam · Post by **adam** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:36 pm 0

it was the five months work that those bbc lightsynths took that got me... must have cost a bit

wonder whats become of them now... in a cupboard somewhere or the machines been wiped & is being used to surf the net...

the whole livecoding thing does intrigue me, i read a gig report on his site where he said he forgot loads of the commands during the performance! think i'd opt for more of a hardware approach (assigning stuff to keys/sliders) if i was going to do that, though i'm sure there's a way to include programming style elements.... especially since fluxus uses scheme... even if it's just using the values from sliders as the basis of a formula, though i reckon something a bit more clever than that could be done...

piku · Post by **piku** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:19 pm 0

koogy wrote: ha, i wrote to the bbc asking what these were made with but they couldn't tell me at the time. they were quite lovely, would respond to the announcers voice in realtime. they've stopped using it now though in favour of things that are much duller.

Yeah, those Hippos...

Is there anything simple to use that'll generate fun abstract patterns and swirly gubbins? Preferably something that doesn't require any immediate reading of the instructions so I can see if I like it.

Oh yeah, I should explain this a bit more... I have a 360 with Neon, I'm not after sound-to-light or play-along-to-sound. I just want something vaguely Trip-A-Tronish where I can wiggle a mouse and see pretty shapes, etc.

koogy · Post by **koogy** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 3:38 pm 0

piku wrote:
koogy wrote: ha, i wrote to the bbc asking what these were made with but they couldn't tell me at the time. they were quite lovely, would respond to the announcers voice in realtime. they've stopped using it now though in favour of things that are much duller.
Yeah, those Hippos...

i like those, but they are BBC1 (or ONE as it is now, somehow). the BBC4 idents are those split screen things where people disappear halfway up ladders and appear somewhere else. and seagulls.

before (good):
http://thetvroom.com/old/p-bbc-four-2002-a.shtml (and ...b.shtml)
after (bad):
http://thetvroom.com/old/p-bbc-four-2005-a.shtml

(great site btw)

i did have a quick bash at doing my own as an xscreensaver module. turned out quite fun but nothing like the originals...

this was before i discovered antialiasing, obj 8

nebogeo · Post by **nebogeo** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:41 am 0

adam wrote:the whole livecoding thing does intrigue me, i read a gig report on his site where he said he forgot loads of the commands during the performance! think i'd opt for more of a hardware approach (assigning stuff to keys/sliders) if i was going to do that, though i'm sure there's a way to include programming style elements.... especially since fluxus uses scheme... even if it's just using the values from sliders as the basis of a formula, though i reckon something a bit more clever than that could be done...

The nice thing about livecoding is that it's much more than changing parameters - you get to build the entire structure of something in response to whats going on around you. The other thing is that far from being too geeky - it seems to be more accessible for people who don't understand programming or even computers - as they can see that you are building _something_ and understand the connection with what they are seeing (or hearing).

I recommend giving it a try - it takes a lot of practice though, I've been doing it for a couple of years now, and only just feeling comfortable with it - and remembering most of my commands on stage

adam · Post by **adam** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:28 pm 0

ooooh ello!

there's been a tiny bit of discussion in the programming forum about pygmy too (you might have seen it already, in the learning programming thread).

i think what i was driving at with using hardware controllers to program was some kind of clever use of scheme macro's... so that the parameters being changed by the slider would be blocks of code... i presume this could be chunked down to a very low level so that a slider had 20 individual commands mapped along it's length... but yes... might take some of the white-knuckleness from it... i'm still getting my head round the whole metaprogramming thing (code that writes code), so not speaking from experience, but more a feeling that some really cool stuff could be done this way...

nebogeo · Post by **nebogeo** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:26 pm 0

yep, that kind of thing is interesting - there may be easier ways of programming than typing. for audio gigs at the moment I'm programming with a gamepad, which is easier in some ways - harder in others

adam · Post by **adam** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:22 pm 0

gamepad... sounds interesting. someone else on here has made a speccy emulator for the DS, i was pondering how to rig it up so the gamepad could be used for typing/programming, i remember the digital nomad bloke had some kind of mini keyboard he used as he cycled along... what approach are you using?

nebogeo · Post by **nebogeo** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:09 am 0

with the DS you have the touch screen as virtual keyboard I guess?

I'm using ring menus:
http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=BetaBlocker
there are some movies there.

adam · Post by **adam** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:30 pm 0

yeah thats what he's doing... hang on i'll try & find the thread:

http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?t=5 ... y&start=15

your ring menus look totally bonkers

remind me slightly of the um... can't remember the name, tracker i think, typing thing designed by a bloke in cambridge... letters are arranged on the right of the screen and one scrolls otwards them... the computer guesses what letters are coming next & makes them bigger (easier to hit).... hope that's an apt description...

koogy · Post by **koogy** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:05 pm 0

adam wrote:your ring menus look totally bonkers ;-) remind me slightly of the um... can't remember the name, tracker i think, typing thing designed by a bloke in cambridge... letters are arranged on the right of the screen and one scrolls otwards them... the computer guesses what letters are coming next & makes them bigger (easier to hit).... hope that's an apt description...

yes, dasher - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ . looks so much easier than, say, blinking out the letters to your assistant...

you can (could?) also get ring menu plugins for the mozilla browser. took some getting used to.

nebogeo, care to describe just what going on in those pictures? the code looks as though it's implemented some kind of assembler language. what does the actual output look like (or sound like)? (the video didn't work for me)

adam · Post by **adam** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 5:57 pm 0

dasher, thats it.... funnily enough i found it really uncomfortable to use with a stylus... i imagine it'd be good with one of those headrest style mice that the paralysed use... just lean ones head to the side slightly

nebogeo · Post by **nebogeo** » Wed Dec 13, 2006 4:31 pm 0

koogy wrote:
adam wrote:your ring menus look totally bonkers remind me slightly of the um... can't remember the name, tracker i think, typing thing designed by a bloke in cambridge... letters are arranged on the right of the screen and one scrolls otwards them... the computer guesses what letters are coming next & makes them bigger (easier to hit).... hope that's an apt description...
yes, dasher - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ . looks so much easier than, say, blinking out the letters to your assistant...

that great! not sure what for exactly, but great!

koogy wrote:you can (could?) also get ring menu plugins for the mozilla browser. took some getting used to..

I think they only really make sense with a joystick interface, I've always found them cumbersome to use with a mouse.

koogy wrote:nebogeo, care to describe just what going on in those pictures? the code looks as though it's implemented some kind of assembler language. what does the actual output look like (or sound like)? (the video didn't work for me)

The language is assembler like, mainly inspired by redcode ( http://vyznev.net/corewar/guide.html ) in that it's constantly writing over itself - but also quite forth like in that it's largely stack based.

The visual output is the memory, and the processes are visible as they run the code, and write to different memory positions. Data used as addresses can be shown with an arrow pointing to the memory location. It drives my synth and sampler via network messages, which play acid techno burps and drum samples