Punk computing

This came down the HPR pipe a couple of days ago. Listened today. Thought I should share.

Punk computing.

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ambientic monotonic pieceus

Yey! I’ve finished a piece! It’s a inspired a bit by Kraftwerks ‘Klingklang,’ even if mine isn’t deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence as Kraftwerks … track.

What started out as a test of a theory about how you could use ChucK’s spork-keyword to trigger notes, but still have plenty of room for per-sample synthesis, turned out to be an exercise in FM synthesis, reverb controlling, arrays, and on using BPM as a timer: all of which I have wanted to play around with.

Return of the ChucK!

(Despite this post’s name, it will not – I repeat; will not – contain any Chuck Norris jokes. Stop looking!)

Ok, so after reading this post about some vim tricks, I – for some reason that I can’t remember – thought about the audio/live coding-language that I were playing with maybe a year ago. That language were – of course ChucK. It’s a blunt little live coding environment with some nifty features – or as the website say: “ChucK is a Strongly-timed, Concurrent, and On-the-fly
Audio Programming Language.”

One thing that bugged the hell out of me when I tested it last time, was that the system was extremely clumsy when I wanted to spork a new shred, or replace an old shred(meaning: adding a new track, or updating the audio in a existing track). I used Gedit, so I had to code everything there, save, go to a terminal and type a command every time I wanted to hear what I were doing – that’s actually pretty tideous when you are just experimenting with different oscillator/filter-settings. Since I putted ChucK on the shelf I’ve been toying with the text-editor vim, so when I read that you could execute commands inside vim I though I should give it another go.

A walk in the valley of bugs and quirks

Okay, so when I got bored of Dyne:bolic and pure:dyne (mostly because there weren’t the flora of software that I were looking for, and I’m not that keen on compiling dependencies), I started too look for something else.

I found Musix. Musix is great, but that isn’t what I’m gonna talk about. Instead I’m tell you a little about some problems I found when dealing with amSynth. It’s a really great soft synth that I’ve wanted to try for a long time.

However, amSynth got some really annoying bugs and quirks that you’ll stumble upon very quickly – and which can turn it into a very unpleasant experience. I’m gonna walk you through those I found and solved the two hours I were playing.

Retro movie-feel

Some week ago, I watched the new Bond-movie Casino Royal (pretty good, but not a Bond). Since I’m a cheap bastard I got a pirated copy from a guy I know who is a file-sharing guru. And since, as we all know, it were pirated, it were in a pretty bad shape. Probably a first time decoding job for someone.

The encoder/decoder had managed to delete all the extras and every but one 5.1 Dolby-channel. I don’t mind the extra, And I can even live with bad quality video, but when you fuck with the audio, you fuck with me.

However, it ended up OK. He were running the movie’s bass-channel through the treble-speaker, and together with the pre 70’th-setting, it turned out really cool. It sounded like the old movies did. The only time where it lacked were in the gunfights, but since there were very few of that kind, I weren’t disappointed.

I’ll definitely remember this trick :)