Software over the rainbow

After the recent workshop by joan soler-adillon in hangar, we’ve known of two more forthcoming workshops:

• on October the 16th, 19th, 23th, 26th, 30th and November the 2nd, gerald kogler will teach one at the centro cívico Golferichs of barcelona. + info
• on October the 24th, 25th and 26th, federico joselevich will give another one in Granollers, at La Fàbrica de les Arts. + info

ChucK has gone through some api changes and tasty additions (low, band, high and stop pass filters…) in its last revision. I’ve just updated the edit mode which I did for JEdit. You can get it from here:

Chuck jedit mode updated for 1.2.0.7

For instructions on how to install, have a look at the previous post: JEdit for ChucK

Update: Thomas Friese has sent me a corrected version (mainly with removed duplicates) and has added some missing properties and methods. Now it is the “official” download. Thanks Tasmo!

I don’t remember how I arrived at sonenvir, a

research project that investigates applying sonification in a number of scientific disciplines, in order to develop a general sonification software environment.

but after seeing Psycollider , I’m really glad I did.

Psycollider is a windows port of the popular Supercollider real time audio synthesis programming language. As far as I know, it used to be only for the mac. Then there was a Linux version and someone was working on a Windows one, but this port seemed too outdated and inactive for me to bother trying it.

Yesterday, when I found it with a nice installer and simple instructions, I couldn’t resist installing it, and after figuring out a couple of oddities, I’ve been able to make some noise…

More on this to come soon, I guess.

So yesterday I gave a talk about my experience with processing at the begining processing workshop which is being held at Hangar by Joan Soler.

First part was about my reasons for learning-using-loving processing and how I’ve managed to use it in a commercial context. Then I went into a tutorial explaining the ascii video sketch. Finally i improvised an explanation of a del.icio.us information visualization project I had done at a previous workshop, which i think turned to be the most interesting thing for the audience.

It was my first experience as a speaker and although i don’t think it went too bad, the ascii tutorial didn’t work as I expected. Going too deep into code details doesn’t seem to be approppriate for a one hour session. Lesson learned.

Anyway, here are the slides (in spanish only) and the source files for the ascii tutorial.

Thanks very much to Joan for inviting me and to all the assistants for not leaving the room.

In my never ending search for a one-size-fits-all code editor, I’ve been trying JEdit for the last couple of weeks.

Reasons? With some plugins, it’s said to be a good choice for ruby on rails; toxi published an edit mode and a lot of abbreviations which speed up the work with processing; it’s multi-platform; and the most important thing, it is extremely configurable, while not being as fat as eclipse.

Until the recent release of the miniaudicle for windows there were very few options for syntax highlighting of ChucK files in this platform, so, using a couple of edit modes from languages that I know better, the ChucK reference and some help from chuck-users, I’ve made a ChucK edit mode. This means that now i have syntax coloring for keywords, ugens, methods and operators.

(Note: the awful colors correspond to the moment in which I decided to stop trying new ones. Don’t worry, they’re configurable too)

To install it:

1. put the file chuck.xml in C:\Documents and Settings\username\.jedit\modes.
2. write this in the catalog file in the same folder: <MODE NAME=”chuck” FILE=”chuck.xml” FILE_NAME_GLOB=”*.ck” />

And that’s pretty much it. You should be seeing some nice color in your chuck files.

If you detect any error or improvable thing or want some additional help, just tell me: jesus {youknow} jesusgollonet.com

So I have begun trying to learn chuck again.

To do it, I took alex maclean’s advice to the letter:

…my best advice when looking for inspiration is to listen to your favorite pieces of music. Listen to the structure behind a piece and think about how you might write an algorithm to create that structure…

(From Hacking perl in nightclubs)

And that’s what I came up with:

Clapping music is a piece by steve reich in which two performers repeat a simple pattern clapping their hands, with a little shifting every eight repetitions (for a better explanation see the wikipedia entry or watch a video).

The structure is so simple that I thought It would be a good starting point for a chuck exercise… And that’s what I did. Each “clapper” is on a stereo channel. The shifting occurs every 4th repetition.

See the code

Hear the result

Credits:

Score image taken from crownpoint

Claps sound taken from freesound (thanks noisecollector).

Agradable sorpresa del siempre agradablemente sorprendente keith peters:

Brevity:

Brevity is a new language, based around ActionScript 3.0. It provides a very simple syntax to create ActionScript 3 based SWFs. Think “Processing for Flash”. In fact, Brevity is very much inspired by Processing

El concepto es exacto al de processing: Conforme el actionscript 3.0 se va conviertiendo en un lenguaje de programadores de verdad, se vuelve más difícil de aprender para los que no tienen ninguna idea, así que brevity pretende devolver al flash una sintaxis simple para aprender o hacer prototipos o experimentos rápidos.

Otro proyecto interesante de pedagogía y programación (y van…). Veamos como se desarrolla.

Más info.

Via brendandawes, quien también nos prepara una sorpresa pronto.