livecoding

livecoding via sms anyone? an expensive and annoyingly hard hobby for sure.
but the RedPDU supercollider class makes this possible in any case. it can decode mobile phone text messages in the pdu format. and with a serial connection to your phone (bluetooth or cable), it is easy to directly download incoming sms from your phone into supercollider and interpret them. no additional hardware required.
the class is available here. (there is also a mxj java version for max/msp called f0.pdu here)

and here's a short demo video where i send a short message to myself...

RedPDU from redFrik on Vimeo.

the code i texted in this video was...

Pbind('degree', Pn(Pseries(0, 2, 5), 4), 'dur', 0.1, 'amp', 0.5).play

and the sc receiver function is in the helpfile. but note: on many phones it is impossible to type characters like {} [] \ | etc. you might want to add some find&replace functionality and use <> meaning curly brackets etc.

april 2009, 30 days, 1hour/day. do something and show the result to your contracting party. similar to our previous live-coding practising sessions (aug2006 and jun2007). this time i battle marcus fjellström. follow his daily work here.

my rules are: on the last day of march, code a single synthdef in supercollider that i'll force myself to make music with all throughout the month. i'm not allowed to use any other synthdefs! if i need to change the synth definition during the 30 days, all the music written up to that point will be affected. these constraints are both quite strict and quite silly i know, but i imagine it'll help me focus my 1hour work on controlling the synth instead of rewriting the synthesis part all the time (bad habit). of course it is not the optimal way to make music in sc. normally one would opt for smaller synthdefs that do less and are interconnect via busses. see that as a warning and don't copy my synthdef below. it's a big ugly beast.

so here's first the synthdef. coded on march 31st...
pact - pre

and here follows the code i write for it each day + short mp3 excerpts for the corresponding code is attached below...

finally rendered mp3 excerpts of my 31 one hour practice sessions from last year. music quality varies... but the code and history files are still available here.

together with a track by slub, one of my 'live coding practice' tracks can be heard on this radio show...

The Wire On Air: Adventures In Modern Music 01 May 2008
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/955/

here i've attached the supercollider history file from my performance at the headphones concert at the livecoding festival in sheffield... livecode.access-space.org
it's a bit embarrassing if you study it more carefully. the use of ~pub near the end is a big mistake for instance. i meant ~out and i don't know what i was thinking there...
you can also look at the file '2007-20-20pub.rtf' for the actual document i used. some comments in there didn't make it to the history file as i forgot to evaluate them.

here are also the notes and statistics from my presentation "Live coding practice" in which i talked about my month worth of practising.

in preparation for the loss livecode festival in sheffield, i'm doing another month of practice. 1 hour/day, start with an empty document, no third-party classes or ugens and then upload the result here.

this time my sparring partner is photographer and artist www.fotokatie.com/katier. she's doing a very nice series of 'star shots'.

in addition to getting my livecoding chops in shape (hopefully), i got commissioned to analyse and present the outcome at the festival. this is a great thing. so the bet with katier provides the pressure, the scheduled talk the deadline for analysis, the upcoming gig the motivation and last the commission pays for one strong coffee at my favourite café each day of the period. what could go wrong?
well, it's summer and i've been working too much as is...

nick has written a nice paper on live coding practice. he discusses some of the issues discovered while doing the practising pact last august.
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/nc81/research/livecodingpractice.pdf

nick and i made a pact to do 1hour of live coding practice for each day of august. julian joined in too on a couple of days.

here are rendered mp3s of my practising sessions. music quality varies...

they're all coded from scratch (synthesis, patterns etc) in ~1hour using plain jitlib. the sourcecode is available here... code
(you might need to copy and paste or select all to see it as i accidentally colorised all the documents)
so rather than listening to the static mp3s above, i'd recommend to download supercollider and play [with] the code.

i think i've identified two problems. first the getting-started and then the getting-on-when-you-finally-got-started.
in the beginning there's always the empty document... uhu. so setting up a little task to solve or having an idea of some soundscape i'd like to create seemed to help. it was usually ideas like use fm-synthesis today or make soft drone sounds tonight. still, many times it started out sounding just awful and i got more and more stressed trying fix it. any livecoders recognise this feeling? ;-) but pulling some tricks (usually distortion or delay effects :-) and focusing in on a few details - muting other sounds - i think i managed shape all the code to become somewhat okey sounding in the end. i only reset the clock and started all over from scratch twice.