Tag Archives: supercollider

Dispacci dal fronte interno

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Dispacci dal fronte interno [Dispatches from the homefront] is a work by Andrea Valle for feedback system including ad libitum strings, printer and live electronics.

Audio from strings, printers and environment is not only manipulated live, but some features are extracted and used to control not only the same sound processing but also the real-time generation and print on the fly of musical notation to be performed by the player.

In short, the performer receives “dispatches” which content depends on what s/he is playing.

From SONIC SCREENS, an event by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi) in collaboration with O’ and Die Schachtel
Milan, 01/12/2012

An excerpt from the premiere by:
Èdua Amarilla Zádory – Violin
Ana Topalovic – Violoncello

Video courtesy Gianmarco Del Re

Dispacci dal fronte interno from Andrea Valle on Vimeo.

BEASTmulch

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super-collider

BEASTmulch is an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded research project exploring approaches to large-scale multichannel electroacoustic composition and presentation, lead by Scott Wilson along with Jonty Harrison and Sergio Luque at the University of Birmingham.

BEASTmulch System is a software tool for the presentation of electroacoustic music over multichannel systems. Designed primarily with a classic ‘live diffusion’ model in mind, it is nevertheless flexible enough to be adapted for a number of purposes, and can support input and output configurations of arbitrary complexity (i.e. live inputs, soundfiles with varying numbers of channels, etc.).

The software has numerous features (e.g. realtime reconfigurable routing, channel processing, automation, etc.), incorporates various standard and non-standard spatialisation techniques (VBAP, ambisonics, etc.), and adapts easily to both small and large (i.e. > 100 loudspeakers) systems.

BEASTmulch System is the software component of the BEAST concert system.

System Requirements: Mac OSX 10.4 – 10.5 (10.6 compatibility forthcoming).

BEASTmulchLib is a SuperCollider class library designed for use in the creation, processing and presentation of complex multichannel signal chains. Objects include sources, matrix routers and mixers, and sound processors and spatialisers. The latter are based on a simple user-extensible plugin architecture. Many classes have elegant GUI representations.

The library also includes classes which represent a variety of different controllers, including MIDI controllers, GUI Faders, EtherSense, etc., and provides support for controller automation (i.e automated mixing and diffusion).

It supports a number of common spatialisation techniques, such as Ambisonics, and includes SC ports of Ville Pullki’s Vector Base Amplitude Panning (VBAP), and the Loris analysis resynthesis method. It also supports some idiosyncratic techniques, such as Spatial Swarm Granulation, and provides utility classes for Speaker Array balancing and visualisation.

Currently the library is not fully cross-platform: GUI classes and UGens are OSX only.

Site is here.

140 chars of music

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A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire‘s online readership here.

Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.

You can listen to all the pieces or download the whole album on this page and also look at the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.

Some excerpts:

The artists notes are here.