Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites?
I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
~Kyle
On 9/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Christian Klippel wrote:
hi steffen, i'd like to refer you to the right keywords: covox speech thing & disney sound source in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
Btw, the first MOD player I've ever used, had plans for a Covox straight in its manual. I didn't build one, though I really SHOULD have. It would have bridged the gap between 1-bit PC Speakers and the 320$ 8-bit SoundBlaster that my parents had.
Note that the 1-bit PC Speaker didn't really sound like 1-bit in that program, due to some serious oversampling: The program introduced ultrasounds which were then hardware-lowpassed into intermediate speaker positions. Still, a covox would have sounded much better... or at least, a cable going out to a real speaker...
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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I started with Impulse Tracker. I learned about it when I read they were using it for the music for Unreal. So I guess it all pretty much goes back to video games. :)
Ben
Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites?
I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
~Kyle
On 9/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Christian Klippel wrote:
hi steffen, i'd like to refer you to the right keywords: covox speech thing & disney sound source in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
Btw, the first MOD player I've ever used, had plans for a Covox straight in its manual. I didn't build one, though I really SHOULD have. It would have bridged the gap between 1-bit PC Speakers and the 320$ 8-bit SoundBlaster that my parents had.
Note that the 1-bit PC Speaker didn't really sound like 1-bit in that program, due to some serious oversampling: The program introduced ultrasounds which were then hardware-lowpassed into intermediate speaker positions. Still, a covox would have sounded much better... or at least, a cable going out to a real speaker...
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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screamtracker -> fasttracker2 -> midi-synths(sequencers) -> pd
but starting to look on tracking again, when remembering how fast you could "write" a "complete" tune by quickly moving with the keyboard on the "pattern grid" and plottin notes and effects...
-andre
On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 12:53 -0500, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites?
I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
~Kyle
On 9/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Christian Klippel wrote:
hi steffen, i'd like to refer you to the right keywords: covox speech thing & disney sound source in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
Btw, the first MOD player I've ever used, had plans for a Covox straight in its manual. I didn't build one, though I really SHOULD have. It would have bridged the gap between 1-bit PC Speakers and the 320$ 8-bit SoundBlaster that my parents had.
Note that the 1-bit PC Speaker didn't really sound like 1-bit in that program, due to some serious oversampling: The program introduced ultrasounds which were then hardware-lowpassed into intermediate speaker positions. Still, a covox would have sounded much better... or at least, a cable going out to a real speaker...
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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On Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 09:18:13PM +0200, Andre Schmidt wrote:
screamtracker -> fasttracker2 -> midi-synths(sequencers) -> pd
but starting to look on tracking again, when remembering how fast you could "write" a "complete" tune by quickly moving with the keyboard on the "pattern grid" and plottin notes and effects...
yes. the 'pattern grid' seems somewhat compatible with 'gridflow grid':
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/image.php?image=gallery/coding/pd-patches/...
-andre
On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 12:53 -0500, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites?
I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
~Kyle
On 9/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Christian Klippel wrote:
hi steffen, i'd like to refer you to the right keywords: covox speech thing & disney sound source in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
Btw, the first MOD player I've ever used, had plans for a Covox straight in its manual. I didn't build one, though I really SHOULD have. It would have bridged the gap between 1-bit PC Speakers and the 320$ 8-bit SoundBlaster that my parents had.
Note that the 1-bit PC Speaker didn't really sound like 1-bit in that program, due to some serious oversampling: The program introduced ultrasounds which were then hardware-lowpassed into intermediate speaker positions. Still, a covox would have sounded much better... or at least, a cable going out to a real speaker...
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
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On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites? I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
I started with MODedit, then switched to ScreamTrackerIII when it finally came out, then later to ImpulseTracker. I didn't do any of this beyond DOS (I've had DRDOS installed on my computer for twelve years, but never any Windows).
If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based; but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
.b.
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites? I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
I started with MODedit, then switched to ScreamTrackerIII when it finally came out, then later to ImpulseTracker. I didn't do any of this beyond DOS (I've had DRDOS installed on my computer for twelve years, but never any Windows).
If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based; but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, B. Bogart wrote:
OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
I've heard about it, but never used it. When I started, Amiga didn't exist, and AFAIK it never ever got sold in my town, and I never heard about Amiga so much until it became a legend of the past.
Instead, I was raised on http://artengine.ca/matju/coco/rstrscocobasicahead.jpg and http://artengine.ca/matju/coco/color-logo-1.jpg http://artengine.ca/matju/coco/color-logo-2.jpg http://artengine.ca/matju/coco/color-logo-3.jpg when I was 5-6 years old.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
B. Bogart wrote:
OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
.b.
Me too, from about 1994 to 2002.
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based; but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
I wrote an OctaMED .med to GridFlow+Pd converter once, in Java (I hadn't learned enough C at that point). It worked, but the Pd player skipped horribly when switching patterns, because they were displayed in a huge number of floatatoms...
I will rewrite that converter in C (or maybe I'll learn enough Ruby to be able to write a GridFlow Pd object to load .med directly) once Trakka is stable (in terms of functionality/API/etc, it hasn't crashed yet..).
Here's a current screenshot:
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/image.php?image=gallery/coding/pd-patches/...
It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as our first (or early) computer music environments. If I were a strict empiricist with no knowledge of logical proof, I'd boldly say that MOD tracker => Pd. But, alas, so many of my heyday tracking crew haven't yet taken the plunge, no matter how often I try to market for Pd.
~Kyle
On 9/12/06, Claude Heiland-Allen claudiusmaximus@goto10.org wrote:
B. Bogart wrote:
OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
.b.
Me too, from about 1994 to 2002.
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based; but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
I wrote an OctaMED .med to GridFlow+Pd converter once, in Java (I hadn't learned enough C at that point). It worked, but the Pd player skipped horribly when switching patterns, because they were displayed in a huge number of floatatoms...
I will rewrite that converter in C (or maybe I'll learn enough Ruby to be able to write a GridFlow Pd object to load .med directly) once Trakka is stable (in terms of functionality/API/etc, it hasn't crashed yet..).
Here's a current screenshot:
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/image.php?image=gallery/coding/pd-patches/...
Claude
Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as our first (or early) computer music environments. If I were a strict empiricist with no knowledge of logical proof, I'd boldly say that MOD tracker => Pd. But, alas, so many of my heyday tracking crew haven't yet taken the plunge, no matter how often I try to market for Pd.
~Kyle
well, "MOD tracker => pd" is really a rather bold statement (if it can be considered a statement at all ;). the fixed-grid-edit nature of classic trackers and the modular patcher paradigm of pd are not obviously compatible; if we speak in evolutionary terms, we might be looking for a missing link. to me, the missing link between trackers and pd was definitely jeskola buzz, an environment with samplers, synths and effects, which could be chained in a modular way. the sequencing was done in a tracker interface, but the signal flow was more pd-like. those were the days...
charlie
Hallo, Christopher Charles hat gesagt: // Christopher Charles wrote:
well, "MOD tracker => pd" is really a rather bold statement (if it can be considered a statement at all ;). the fixed-grid-edit nature of classic trackers and the modular patcher paradigm of pd are not obviously compatible; if we speak in evolutionary terms, we might be looking for a missing link. to me, the missing link between trackers and pd was definitely jeskola buzz, an environment with samplers, synths and effects, which could be chained in a modular way. the sequencing was done in a tracker interface, but the signal flow was more pd-like. those were the days...
I once did stuff like that using a midi tracker. Pd was used as sound engine, and the midi tracker for sequencing. There are several midi trackers around: I have used ttrk and Shaketracker on Linux.
BTW: Yesterday I was using Nitrotracker on Nintendo DS with my shiny new SC Lite, but file access so far is too slow. I want PDa for NDS, puleeeze!
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 08:29:37PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
I once did stuff like that using a midi tracker. Pd was used as sound engine, and the midi tracker for sequencing. There are several midi trackers around: I have used ttrk and Shaketracker on Linux.
I tried this too, but I found the timing to be a bit too loose (shaketracker). Seq24 is a great app for this kind of thing, but uses up a lot of CPU when running in conjunction with Pd.
BTW: Yesterday I was using Nitrotracker on Nintendo DS with my shiny new SC Lite, but file access so far is too slow. I want PDa for NDS, puleeeze!
Your wish is almost granted. I've ported PDa to the GP2X (and sent the patch to GÃnter) so a DSLinux port could happen quite soon - i.e. They both have the same CPU and I am working on it. It will be soooo cool to have all yr Pd patches in your pocket to whip out at parties for a bit of real-time joystick-controlled generative dance music. ;)
Nitrotracker is pretty cool but it sucks that all the notes have to be at the same volume.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
Hallo, Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:
Your wish is almost granted. I've ported PDa to the GP2X (and sent the patch to GÃnter) so a DSLinux port could happen quite soon - i.e. They both have the same CPU and I am working on it. It will be soooo cool to have all yr Pd patches in your pocket to whip out at parties for a bit of real-time joystick-controlled generative dance music. ;)
Yes, that's really good news. If you need testers, I'm in for it. The advantage of using a DS is of course the touchscreen, which the GP2X lacks. So far DSLinux misses a really working (nano-)X and tcl/tk.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 11:14:33AM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:
Your wish is almost granted. I've ported PDa to the GP2X (and sent the patch to GÃnter) so a DSLinux port could happen quite soon - i.e. They both have the same CPU and I am working on it. It will be soooo cool to have all yr Pd patches in your pocket to whip out at parties for a bit of real-time joystick-controlled generative dance music. ;)
Yes, that's really good news. If you need testers, I'm in for it. The advantage of using a DS is of course the touchscreen, which the GP2X lacks. So far DSLinux misses a really working (nano-)X and tcl/tk.
Yeah, the touchscreen would be _really_ cool. I am not optimistic about a solution involving X and tcl/tk since i think the resource requirements would be too much to run Pd as well. I think something more feasible might be to make a separate GUI app like in iPodPd. This would require some kernel hacking on DSLinux to introduce a 'touchpad' mode as well as the mouse/keyboard modes present in there now. I have not even talked to any of the developers about that yet, but it's a long term plan of mine. In the short term, getting an ncurses based control (with the gamepad controls) and a working DS-PDa in no-gui mode should not be too difficult. Will let you know if I make any progress on that. I believe the microphone doesn't work yet though, so it can't be used as a little guitar FX unit just yet.
On the GP2X I have Pd running in no-gui mode and am in the process of writing a python/pygame frontend which basically does what iPodPd gui frontend does. It will parse Pd files looking for GUI elements and then make it's own versions, controllable by the gamepad controls, so no tcl/tk or X is needed there too. So far I have Pd's toggle, numberbox, and comments implemented. I am a huge fan of gamepad controlled music interfaces (fijuu!) so I'm really keen to get this working and that's where most of my efforts are focussed at the moment.
I don't have an ETA for any of this. :/
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
Hi Chris and List,
Great news that you have ported to GP2X. I'm hoping to get one soon. Where can we find it?
Thanks! p
On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 17:18 +0800, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 08:29:37PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
I once did stuff like that using a midi tracker. Pd was used as sound engine, and the midi tracker for sequencing. There are several midi trackers around: I have used ttrk and Shaketracker on Linux.
I tried this too, but I found the timing to be a bit too loose (shaketracker). Seq24 is a great app for this kind of thing, but uses up a lot of CPU when running in conjunction with Pd.
BTW: Yesterday I was using Nitrotracker on Nintendo DS with my shiny new SC Lite, but file access so far is too slow. I want PDa for NDS, puleeeze!
Your wish is almost granted. I've ported PDa to the GP2X (and sent the patch to GÜnter) so a DSLinux port could happen quite soon - i.e. They both have the same CPU and I am working on it. It will be soooo cool to have all yr Pd patches in your pocket to whip out at parties for a bit of real-time joystick-controlled generative dance music. ;)
Nitrotracker is pretty cool but it sucks that all the notes have to be at the same volume.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
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On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 09:09:24AM -0400, Paris Treantafeles wrote:
Hi Chris and List,
Great news that you have ported to GP2X. I'm hoping to get one soon. Where can we find it?
Where can you find a gp2x or where can you find Pd for gp2x? gp2x you can purchase from http://gp2x.co.uk/ or http://gp2x.com.au/ if you're in Australia.
Pd for gp2x currently exists as a small patch to GÃnter's PDa. It's not up on his PDa site yet since he's a busy fellow, but if you want it I can send it to you. I'm going to make a page specifically for PDa on the gp2x (with binary downloads for gp2x) when I have finished developing the joustick controlled python/pygame frontend for it, and I will announce that on this list. In the meantime you can only build and run it in no-gui mode so your patches would have to be purely algorithmic with no interaction or something similar.
Will let you know via pd-announce when I have the gui working.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
Hi Chris and List,
Ah... sorry for not being more specific. I meant Pd for gp2x.
I don't have one yet but hope to order one before the end of the year
so yes, please keep us informed of your progress!
Best, p
On Sep 16, 2006, at 3:25 AM, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 09:09:24AM -0400, Paris Treantafeles wrote:
Hi Chris and List,
Great news that you have ported to GP2X. I'm hoping to get one soon. Where can we find it?
Where can you find a gp2x or where can you find Pd for gp2x? gp2x you can purchase from http://gp2x.co.uk/ or http://gp2x.com.au/ if you're in Australia.
Pd for gp2x currently exists as a small patch to GÜnter's PDa. It's
not up on his PDa site yet since he's a busy fellow, but if you want it
I can send it to you. I'm going to make a page specifically for PDa on
the gp2x (with binary downloads for gp2x) when I have finished developing the joustick controlled python/pygame frontend for it, and I will announce that on this list. In the meantime you can only build and run it in no-gui mode so your patches would have to be purely algorithmic
with no interaction or something similar.Will let you know via pd-announce when I have the gui working.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/ listinfo/pd-list
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:08:04 -0500 "Kyle Klipowicz" kyleklip@gmail.com wrote:
It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as our first (or early) computer music environments.
Kinda missed out on trackers, somewhere between beeps on the BBC micro or Commodore 64, and my first Atari ST with Cubase. My first ever "computer music" was on a ZX81, which doesn't have a soundcard, but if you put a radio next to it you could hear the programs running off station at 4MHz because the crappy little plastic box had no EMI shielding, so by inserting nops in a loop you could make it play musical sequences ;)
I never really liked or took to the tracker list interface, music somehow moves from left to right for me, with pitch on the y axis. It probably comes from reading music score once.
If I were a strict empiricist with no knowledge of logical proof, I'd boldly say that MOD tracker => Pd. But, alas, so many of my heyday tracking crew haven't yet taken the plunge, no matter how often I try to market for Pd.
~Kyle
I think of things like Spice as the precursors to Pd, in a way it couldn't be more different under the hood than a list based sequencer. Although Miller and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks, it doesn't have that syntactic structure or computational causality either. I think it's very open because it's really a netlist of objects. You can make it what you like and because it's open ended "meta-application" rather than a specific tool we end up with a thousand different views of the same thing, cos everybody invents their own. Like it's odd, but nice, that sequencing is done so many different ways and people come onto the list asking how do I make a data recorder and how do I store sequence data in files, because even those things aren't obvious givens. It took me 6 months to find [qlist]. Just about every piece of "music" I write in Pd is still either an algorithmic process or counters and selects banging messages. It's a weird way to compose, but it makes sense and it's fun. Don't think I miss using pianoroll editors at all really. Pd has done some weird things to my take on music. I just got back into hooking up a keyboard again and playing MIDI, which I haven't done for almost 2 years! Pd split my musical world in two, the keyboard just became a thing that makes sounds you can play, which did my enjoyment and performance skills a bit of good. So I got into using the keyboard to work things out musically, but then just doing it in Pd without all that pissing about trying to play it and quantising sequences. I'm hooking up some examples with [midinote] and using adsr envelopes again and the horror of that whole brittle realtime thing with stuck note-offs hanging is like being kicked back to 1985.
oops, prattling on... anyway trackers - pretty sure you could build a great tracker file handler in Pd to import and play some old memories. That would be sweet. A night of listening to my fave unreal level tunes be a laugh. If I remember right a tracker file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have to be read into arrays. (?)
a.
On 9/12/06, Claude Heiland-Allen claudiusmaximus@goto10.org wrote:
B. Bogart wrote:
OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
.b.
Me too, from about 1994 to 2002.
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based; but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
I wrote an OctaMED .med to GridFlow+Pd converter once, in Java (I hadn't learned enough C at that point). It worked, but the Pd player skipped horribly when switching patterns, because they were displayed in a huge number of floatatoms...
I will rewrite that converter in C (or maybe I'll learn enough Ruby to be able to write a GridFlow Pd object to load .med directly) once Trakka is stable (in terms of functionality/API/etc, it hasn't crashed yet..).
Here's a current screenshot:
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/image.php?image=gallery/coding/pd-patches/...
Claude
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http://theradioproject.com http://perhapsidid.blogspot.com
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On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, padawan12 wrote:
Although Miller and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks,
I don't use the quotemarks - I mean, not those that suppose some kind of illegitimacy. In a wide meaning of the word, a language doesn't have to be something verbal or written with letters. Though the etymology points back to a part of the mouth, most would consider the phrase "written language" to not be a contradiction of terms. Here I used quotemarks only as delimiters of a phrase (like I usually do anyway), and not to belittle the phrase.
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
If I remember right a tracker file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have to be read into arrays. (?)
Conceptually you need a 1-D array for the order, a 3-D array of structs for the patterns (pattern#,row,channel), and one array per sample. I say conceptually because the actual layout could be different if it makes things any easier.
For Impulse Tracker files, the 3-D array is to be replaced by a sequence of 2-D arrays because each pattern may have a different number of rows; and also there's the concept of instrument which inserts itself between the concepts of pattern and sample.
IIRC.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
Ooh, I like where this is going...
~Kyle
Conceptually you need a 1-D array for the order, a 3-D array of structs for the patterns (pattern#,row,channel), and one array per sample. I say conceptually because the actual layout could be different if it makes things any easier.
For Impulse Tracker files, the 3-D array is to be replaced by a sequence of 2-D arrays because each pattern may have a different number of rows; and also there's the concept of instrument which inserts itself between the concepts of pattern and sample.
IIRC.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
Although Miller and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks,
I don't use the quotemarks - I mean, not those that suppose some kind of illegitimacy. In a wide meaning of the word, a language doesn't have to be something verbal or written with letters. Though the etymology points back to a part of the mouth, most would consider the phrase "written language" to not be a contradiction of terms. Here I used quotemarks only as delimiters of a phrase (like I usually do anyway), and not to belittle the phrase.
Yeah, I'm with ya. For me those quotemarks say beware the usage of the word, because it does imply some illegitimacy against the commonly understood meaning. They say, if you were hoping to write a program in Pd using vi then you're in for a shitty time. Not to denigrate that word though, since as a "powerful means to express ideas" it's a language. I pretty much always call it a visual language with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode interpreter. I think we can safely say it's not like a written language the way most people think of one. For the love of kittens please don't tell me you DO write your Pd programs in vi and only noobs use the GUI :)
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work. But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a fixed written language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the way blocks are evaluated, so if you don't know and obey the rules it won't work just like any other language.
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
Me neither, unless Millers cracked some quantum jiggerypokery without saying. I mean expression of it. Not exactly elegant in Pd is it? There's always good old [until], "only a matter of time [until] you're gonna have to reboot".
If I remember right a tracker file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have to be read into arrays. (?)
Conceptually you need a 1-D array for the order, a 3-D array of structs for the patterns (pattern#,row,channel), and one array per sample. I say conceptually because the actual layout could be different if it makes things any easier.
For Impulse Tracker files, the 3-D array is to be replaced by a sequence of 2-D arrays because each pattern may have a different number of rows; and also there's the concept of instrument which inserts itself between the concepts of pattern and sample.
That's quite a powerful structure, and the instruments layer makes sense for a polyphonic audio sequencer that wants to deal with multi playbacks from the same table. It would be really interesting to see what ways people came up with for representing that data with a way to read and write MOD files to and from a generaly open ended datastructure sequencer like Franks.
a.
padawan12 wrote:
Yeah, I'm with ya. For me those quotemarks say beware the usage of the word, because it does imply some illegitimacy against the commonly understood meaning. They say, if you were hoping to write a program in Pd using vi then you're in for a shitty time. Not to denigrate that word though, since as a "powerful means to express ideas" it's a language. I pretty much always call it a visual language
yes, i definitely would say too that Pd is a "visual language".
however, "visual language" implues "language" (at least in all human languages i know better, where the adjective ("visual") is just an add-on to the noun ("language"))
with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode
hmm, i would rather say that the _language_ Pd is the thing we DO see, and not the interpreter that is executing it.
interpreter. I think we can safely say it's not like a written language the way most people think of one. For the love of kittens please don't tell me you DO write your Pd programs in vi and only noobs use the GUI :)
we once had a blind programmer, who was very interested in Pd. we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person") on the agenda of pd~convention04, but it has been ignored by all relevant people (most of them probably don't even remember they were asked about it).
he now uses SuperCollider...
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work. But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a fixed written language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially
so? looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax i cannot find any reference of "line" in the entire text. iirc, the syntax specs in kernighan-ritchie ARE a flow-diagram, so there seems to be a relation between syntax and visual languages ;-)
all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the
indeed, it is no text-based language.
mfg.asdr. IOhannes
On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode
hmm, i would rather say that the _language_ Pd is the thing we DO see, and not the interpreter that is executing it.
I would say that the pd language is both the .pd file format and the visual representation for it; that one is a "purely written form" while another is a "drawn form". It's similar to how languages have both a written form and a spoken form, but instead distinguishing between two kinds of visual form: one that works just by sign sequences... words, sentences, paragraphs, in a one-dimensional sequence; and one that works by drawing two-dimensional relationships between elements.
I could make various kinds of diagrams (entity-relationship, ...) out of English or French sentences, and I could argue that those diagrams are a form of the English or French language. (the same would hold for most any human language).
If you think of the C/C++ language, it's largely a free-form language: with some exceptions, the whitespace is ignored. In that sense it's written in a one-dimensional way. However, that's not how people write C/C++: they use indentation and lots of linebreaks. Those things are using the two-dimensional space. However there are higher degrees of utilisation of the two-dimensional space, e.g. PureData.
I tend to format my C/C++ code in a more two-dimensional way than other people, which can piss them off; it also renders automatic reformatters useless/harmful, as they would destroy some visual information in my code.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
we once had a blind programmer,
Mario Lang. I knew him before I knew where Graz is and even before any PureData. I met him on IRC in 2001 because we were both writing in Ruby.
who was very interested in Pd. we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person")
Chun Lee has made great efforts in making Pd (DesireData) more keyboard-accessible, and I've helped him too. I've come up with a system of visual navigation using diagonal quadrants, which is super easy to figure out and use. For Mario, the concept of connectedness would be more useful: imagine yourself going through patchcords, both upstream and downstream. We haven't implemented this one yet.
a voice interface to pd would be interesting to us, in the sense that I would be ready to help someone integrate voice recognition in DesireData. The voice interface could be made to be sufficient for doing everything there is to do in DesireData, though I suppose that on average, people who want to use voice will want to combine it with keyboard and/or mouse.
we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person") on the agenda of but it has been ignored by all relevant people (most of them probably don't even remember they were asked about it).
It'd be easier to make a spot for it at a conference if there was some kind of demo program (or even just a paper) supporting the topic.
he now uses SuperCollider...
(Possibly in part because the syntax of it is very similar to Ruby...)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
Hi Mathieu and List,
This sounds very interesting and I know of people who could really put it to use. Will there be a presentation on DesireData at Piksel?
Thanks, p
On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 22:02 -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
we once had a blind programmer,
Mario Lang. I knew him before I knew where Graz is and even before any PureData. I met him on IRC in 2001 because we were both writing in Ruby.
who was very interested in Pd. we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person")
Chun Lee has made great efforts in making Pd (DesireData) more keyboard-accessible, and I've helped him too. I've come up with a system of visual navigation using diagonal quadrants, which is super easy to figure out and use. For Mario, the concept of connectedness would be more useful: imagine yourself going through patchcords, both upstream and downstream. We haven't implemented this one yet.
a voice interface to pd would be interesting to us, in the sense that I would be ready to help someone integrate voice recognition in DesireData. The voice interface could be made to be sufficient for doing everything there is to do in DesireData, though I suppose that on average, people who want to use voice will want to combine it with keyboard and/or mouse.
we therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person") on the agenda of but it has been ignored by all relevant people (most of them probably don't even remember they were asked about it).
It'd be easier to make a spot for it at a conference if there was some kind of demo program (or even just a paper) supporting the topic.
he now uses SuperCollider...
(Possibly in part because the syntax of it is very similar to Ruby...)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada _______________________________________________ PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Paris Treantafeles wrote:
This sounds very interesting and I know of people who could really put it to use. Will there be a presentation on DesireData at Piksel?
Yes, there's one on lørdag 14. okt. from 17.30 to 19.00, GMT+2.
Speaking of which, today there's also a presentation on DesireData, but it's in Montréal and it's a shorter one.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
Offhand, I'd have to mention that left to right is not by any means a characteristic of all languages ... only Western ones. I think the fact that it has syntax is more linguistically significant, than the fact that its written form appears different than a typical language. If C is a "language" than I'd argue that PD is also one... The problem, if anything, is that C, or PD, have TOO MUCH structure and syntax.
Human language exists in a state of indeterminacy and ambiguity, whereas computer languages are too precise.
~David
No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work. But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a fixed written language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the way blocks are evaluated, so if you don't know and obey the rules it won't work just like any other language.
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
Me neither, unless Millers cracked some quantum jiggerypokery without saying. I mean expression of it. Not exactly elegant in Pd is it? There's always good old [until], "only a matter of time [until] you're gonna have to reboot".
If I remember right a tracker file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have to be read into arrays. (?)
Conceptually you need a 1-D array for the order, a 3-D array of structs for the patterns (pattern#,row,channel), and one array per sample. I say conceptually because the actual layout could be different if it makes things any easier.
For Impulse Tracker files, the 3-D array is to be replaced by a sequence of 2-D arrays because each pattern may have a different number of rows; and also there's the concept of instrument which inserts itself between the concepts of pattern and sample.
That's quite a powerful structure, and the instruments layer makes sense for a polyphonic audio sequencer that wants to deal with multi playbacks from the same table. It would be really interesting to see what ways people came up with for representing that data with a way to read and write MOD files to and from a generaly open ended datastructure sequencer like Franks.
a.
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
padawan12 padawan12@obiwannabe.co.uk writes:
For the love of kittens please don't tell me you DO write your Pd programs in vi and only noobs use the GUI :)
*EMACS*, for the luv of kittens.
./MiS
On 9/13/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, padawan12 wrote:
Although Miller and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks,
I don't use the quotemarks - I mean, not those that suppose some kind of illegitimacy. In a wide meaning of the word, a language doesn't have to be something verbal or written with letters. Though the etymology points back to a part of the mouth, most would consider the phrase "written language" to not be a contradiction of terms. Here I used quotemarks only as delimiters of a phrase (like I usually do anyway), and not to belittle the phrase.
A well-read man on a poetry newsgroup once told me that thought is when one part of the universe imitates another part, and language is an imitation of that imitation. I thought about that a long time and wasn't able to refute it.
Supposedly William J. Sidis could learn a language in one day. "At the age of four, Sidis learned Russian, French, German, and Hebrew, and soon after, Turkish and Armenian." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis My first word was "kitty".
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
I would only say that it isn't one-dimensional. It's still for the most part deterministic, right? I mean there's never any real randomness- I think. The fact that it can follow many paths simultaneously doesn't make it non-syntactical, just awesome.
-Chuckk
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:22:02PM +0100, padawan12 wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:08:04 -0500 "Kyle Klipowicz" kyleklip@gmail.com wrote:
It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as our first (or early) computer music environments.
Kinda missed out on trackers, somewhere between beeps on the BBC micro or Commodore 64, and my first Atari ST with Cubase. My first ever "computer music" was on a ZX81, which doesn't have a soundcard, but if you put a radio next to it you could hear the programs running off station at 4MHz because the crappy little plastic box had no EMI shielding, so by inserting nops in a loop you could make it play musical sequences ;)
[plug] If yr interested in that kind of thing you might like to check out my commodore64 synthesizer software: http://mccormick.cx/viewcvs/aSid/ which you can build using the cc65 compiler and put on your commodore 64 using the MMC64 sd-card-to-c64-cartridge converter (google it). Plug in a couple of analogue paddles and you have a moogy synthesizer for ten bucks/pounds! [/plug]
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
I tried it Chris, wicked stuff. Oddly I've been talking about old sound chips quite a bit recently, there seems to be a revival of interest. Noah Vawter from MIT gave me an explanatin of why the Sid was such a superior beast to the AY38610. Were there any other notable "synthesiser on a chip" attempts?
On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:29:43 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:22:02PM +0100, padawan12 wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:08:04 -0500 "Kyle Klipowicz" kyleklip@gmail.com wrote:
It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as our first (or early) computer music environments.
Kinda missed out on trackers, somewhere between beeps on the BBC micro or Commodore 64, and my first Atari ST with Cubase. My first ever "computer music" was on a ZX81, which doesn't have a soundcard, but if you put a radio next to it you could hear the programs running off station at 4MHz because the crappy little plastic box had no EMI shielding, so by inserting nops in a loop you could make it play musical sequences ;)
[plug] If yr interested in that kind of thing you might like to check out my commodore64 synthesizer software: http://mccormick.cx/viewcvs/aSid/ which you can build using the cc65 compiler and put on your commodore 64 using the MMC64 sd-card-to-c64-cartridge converter (google it). Plug in a couple of analogue paddles and you have a moogy synthesizer for ten bucks/pounds! [/plug]
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
hi,
Am Freitag, 15. September 2006 08:07 schrieb padawan12:
I tried it Chris, wicked stuff. Oddly I've been talking about old sound chips quite a bit recently, there seems to be a revival of interest. Noah Vawter from MIT gave me an explanatin of why the Sid was such a superior beast to the AY38610. Were there any other notable "synthesiser on a chip" attempts?
there is also the ay-3-8910 from yamaha, often used in arcade games (have plenty of them). there are some more fm chips from yamaha, iirc, also used in the atari computers. then we have the famous SID (from the c64), available as pci card nowdays, called "hardsid" (you need old sid's to put in there, of course). for speech, there have been speech synthesis chips like the SC-01 (have one as well, from a broken qbert arcade)
you may also check the MAME/MESS sources. most ancient (and current) soundchips are avilable as emulation there, used for the arcade and microcomputer emulations.
greets,
chris
On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 08:33:26PM +0200, Christian Klippel wrote:
then we have the famous SID (from the c64), available as pci card nowdays, called "hardsid" (you need old sid's to put in there, of course).
And let's not forget the SidStation! http://www.sidstation.com/
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 07:07:44AM +0100, padawan12 wrote:
I tried it Chris, wicked stuff. Oddly I've been talking about old sound chips quite a bit recently, there seems to be a revival of interest. Noah Vawter from MIT gave me an explanatin of why the Sid was such a superior beast to the AY38610. Were there any other notable "synthesiser on a chip" attempts?
I am a big fan of the gameboy based chip tune scene and there have been some truly amazing pieces of music made from a couple of gated square/noise waves and a 32 byte wide 4-bit wavetable. Nanoloop and LSDJ are both excellent composition programs for the GB:
http://www.nanoloop.de/ http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/
I recommend listening to the demo tunes on the LSDJ page - some of them are phenomenal. There's also my own program for the gameboy advance which I have mentioned on this list too many times already so I'm not going to plug it again. :)
Also, htp://www.micromusic.net/
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
There's also some trackers and programs similar to LSDJ for the open source gaming console, GP2x:
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/Software_Directory
I don't have one myself but am tempted to get one and try to develop for it.
Best, p
On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 11:54 +0800, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 07:07:44AM +0100, padawan12 wrote:
I tried it Chris, wicked stuff. Oddly I've been talking about old sound chips quite a bit recently, there seems to be a revival of interest. Noah Vawter from MIT gave me an explanatin of why the Sid was such a superior beast to the AY38610. Were there any other notable "synthesiser on a chip" attempts?
I am a big fan of the gameboy based chip tune scene and there have been some truly amazing pieces of music made from a couple of gated square/noise waves and a 32 byte wide 4-bit wavetable. Nanoloop and LSDJ are both excellent composition programs for the GB:
http://www.nanoloop.de/ http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/
I recommend listening to the demo tunes on the LSDJ page - some of them are phenomenal. There's also my own program for the gameboy advance which I have mentioned on this list too many times already so I'm not going to plug it again. :)
Also, htp://www.micromusic.net/
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
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On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 12:53:20PM -0500, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Just curious, how many of you started computer music due to mod trackers, and which ones were your favorites?
I started with ScreamTracker, but finished out using Impulse Tracker (I was a newbie).
Yep, Fasttracker II and then Impulse Tracker. After all these years I am still trying to figure out a way to get sample-accurate tracker-style sequencing into Pd without loading up a separate application.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Chris McCormick wrote:
Yep, Fasttracker II and then Impulse Tracker. After all these years I am still trying to figure out a way to get sample-accurate tracker-style sequencing into Pd without loading up a separate application.
If you play your samples by combining [line~] and [tabread~], try starting your line at the previous tick, at slightly negative values: the delay before it should start, times the playback speed in samples/second. (right?)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 04:28:00PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Chris McCormick wrote:
Yep, Fasttracker II and then Impulse Tracker. After all these years I am still trying to figure out a way to get sample-accurate tracker-style sequencing into Pd without loading up a separate application.
If you play your samples by combining [line~] and [tabread~], try starting your line at the previous tick, at slightly negative values: the delay before it should start, times the playback speed in samples/second. (right?)
That's cool, thanks for the tip; I'll test it out. I think we can also specify sample accurate line~s with vline~ and we can schedule many of these into the future.
I guess I knew that the 'sample accurate' part is possible, but for me another very important thing about tracking is the interface. People on this list (myself included) have made tracker-style sequencers in pd, but they have never been quite as satisfying as using a real tracker. They always feel a bit kludgy and don't capture that ease of navigation and notation that trackers posses. It's also more about that very special representation and way of navigating than it is about the file format, and it's the reason I have always done 'experimental' music with Pd and more mainstream remixes with trackers.
The gridflow based tracker that claudius posted a link to looks awesome; can't wait to try it out!
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx