On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 05:33 PM, alex wrote:
> So what I'm aiming for now is to be able to start with a blank text
> editor and write code from scratch during the performance. Has anyone
> tried this approach yet?
Perry and I did this in both our Princeton performance and NIME
performance
in Japan (will post report).
In the Princeton performance (our first on-the-fly performance), we
started
with blank editors (I in full-screen ms visual studio and perry in
pico) and
would type out complete (but short, 2-10 line) ChucK programs which we
then saved to disk and ran concurrently from the command line in cygwin
shell (perry and I each had a single virtual machine to run all
program/shreds).
The audience saw the whole process. We had no backups, which caused
the audience to watch us type in silence for 2 minutes because my first
program just wouldn't work (probable cause due to parser bug I later
found). The video that was shown was taken from this performance.
At NIME, we were on os x - both in TextEditor with pt 50+ font. We
started
with blank programs, but this time we also had simple programs from
which
we started from (such as drum loops written in ChucK) and edited both as
parameters and structure. Pictures of my desktop, our score can be
found
here:
http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/listen/on-the-fly/nime2004.html
An important reflection from both shows was that it actually REALLY
helps
to have typed in and thought about some of the code during practice,
more
so in the way of a traditional instrument than a piece of software.
This is
true especially if you are starting in tabula rasa mode. The audience
can
see how fluid you negotiate the code - and they can get a sense of your
thought process through your pauses and "punctuations". It totally
give both
the performer and audience some strange notion and measure of
virtuosity.
> I suppose it lends a certain structure to the performance, starting off
> with one very simple element, developing it a little, adding a little
> bit of structure until it becomes something like a melody, then
> starting
> up another editor, introducing another simple element, developing that
> into a simple rhythm, then coding in some interactions between the two
> processes perhaps, and going from there.
We did nearly exactly what you described. Our NIME performance was
more advanced than our first - the language was more complete, we had
more unit generators. We also really learned a lot from our first
attempt,
so we felt more mentally stable (ha) this time. ChucK programs can
start/replace/stop other ChucK programs with sample-precision, so higher
level programs were written to manage lower-level programs with precise
timing. Perry's drum loops morph'ed over time as he changed code and
swapped in new programs. The processes interacted with each other
using timing directives.
> Just because code exists on disk after a performance, it doesn't
> necessarily mean that it should be run again... It could be thought of
> as a kind of fossilised improvisation. Not even a record of a
> performance, but a frozen impression of the performance at the moment
> of
> its death.
We are working on ways to playback a ChucK performance with precision.
But, Alex's idea of the frozen impression is much more poetic...
Ge!
Received on Thu Jul 08 2004 - 06:08:56 BST