Prelude and Introduction

12 Dec 2007


      Hello all,
I just wanted to give a quick introduction of myself. My name is Michael
McGonagle, and my childhood nickname is "Mogo", a name that has stuck with
me as there are just too many damned Mike's in the world.
My mother was a nurse and played the piano, her favorite thing to play was
"Clair de Lune" by Debussy. It was from here that I got my love for music.
We got a piano when I was about 12 and I would get home every day after
school and just play, teaching myself how to both play the piano and
composing simple tunes. I think I pissed off my father for not just the
amount of time that I played (sometimes as much as 6 hours in the evenings),
but also for the fact that I liked to dismantle the piano, removing the
covers so that I could get access to the insides of the piano.
My first love in music was Beethoven. Next came Bach. It was a long time
before I was able to appreciate 20th century composition, but since that
time, I have learned what things I like and what I don't... My list of
favorite composers range from Stravinski, Subotnick, Stockhausen, Webern,
and many others. A professor that I had in school got me interested in
electronic/computer music. He had built his own computer that did brain wave
analysis (for a doctor friend of his), and he also used it to create some
very rudimentary music.
I started programming back when the Comodore 64 was in its hey day. Working
in assembler was probably my favorite thing (the Assembler program, while I
don't remember the name of it, it was one of the best programming packages I
have ever used). I started to teach myself C in about 1990, and found an
interest in writing other languages in C. I started off with a Forth
interpreter, and used it to create a very rudimentary composition package
for myself. (That was about 1992). I moved on to learn Java, and I tried to
learn C++ (but there was just something about it that seemed perverse in
comparison with C, I will admit I LIKE POINTERS!). I think one of the things
that attracted me to Pure Data was the fact that it is written in C, instead
of C++.
As I work in Graphic Arts, I got interested in writing a PostScript
interpreter in Java. I would say that I still am working on it, but it has
been a couple of years since I have done anything with it. It is a fully
functional programming language, it just doesn't have any of the
graphics primitives that would make it PostScript.
I have been using Pure Data for about 5 years now, on and off. I also have
an interest in fractals, and specifically 'strange attractor' types of
equations. I had written some object classes to deal with these sorts of
functions, and when I found that Ben Bogart had began a library called Chaos
in Pure Data, I worked to expand that library to not only include more
attractor equations, but also added the ability to search for other
parameter sets that would result in a chaotic stream (it wasn't perfect, but
it worked for some of the attractors).
I don't really compose much anymore for "real" instruments. My goal is to
set up some things in Pure Data that deal with granular synthesis using Sine
Wave generators (ala Stockhausen's Studie No 2), drive them using various
fractal equations, genetic programming techniques, or some other form of
stochastic controls.
Currently, my most immediate goal in Pure Data is to create an SQL front end
that allows the storage of arbitrary data in a database. Once that is
"complete", I want to revamp all of my previous projects to take advantage
of using an SQL database to store "compositions", etc. I have created a
front-end for working with Chaos, but as it doesn't have an easy way to
store and recall various parameters, I got frustrated in trying to release
the code. This is one thing I want to rework, as I think it will be useful
to others who are also interested in fractal generators.
Wow, sounds like a lot, and I guess it is for my 45 years on this planet. I
will say that it has been wonderful having access to not just Pure Data, but
the community that has built up around the program.
Michael "Mogo" McGonagle
-- 
Peace may sound simple—one beautiful word— but it requires everything we
have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
—Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999), musician

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