On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 16:44 +0200, Kassen wrote:
> Looks nice, I liked how it comes across as quite simple yet very
> "playable"; of the livecoding performances I saw and downloaded so far
> this strikes me as the closest to traditional musicianship I've seen
> yet but I can't quite place my finger on why this is exactly. Might be
> the relation between the (apparent) simplicity of the system and the
> continuity of the editing.
Thanks for the feedback Kassen... I should point out that I present it
here as an instrument useful for livecoders rather than an example of
live coding itself.
I think live coding is about building a sequence of abstract
imperatives/functions structured by ifs, fors, recursion etc. Here I'm
just playing with a straightforward sequence of sounds.
In the video I do jump out to tweak some values in the Perl but that's
hardly live coding either.
What I have been doing in other trials is live coding regexes over the
string of vocables. For example, changing all 'c's temporarily to 'm's.
I've also added regexes to add some non-determinism, for example a
question mark after a letter makes it only have influence half the time
on average, and a colon between two letters makes it choose between
them. These are quite quick to type:
$word =~ s/(.)\?/rand() > 0.5 ? $1 : ''/eg;
$word =~ s/(.):(.)/rand() > 0.5 ? $1 : $2/eg;
... so quite possible to do during a performance. Regexen seem a good
bedfellow to vocable words, placing so much meaning in single
characters.
The following instructions for making a sound:
Hit loose, dampened drum outwards with heavy stiff mallet, then hit
the middle of the drum with a lighter mallet while tightening the
skin slightly and finally hit the edge of the skin with the same
light mallet while loosening and releasing the dampening
can be expressed with the following:
kopatu
alex
Received on Wed Jul 09 2008 - 15:28:14 BST