#89

i am also kidding about being offended. (though truly, that 'east coast/west coast ’ thing has got to stop. it was marketing bullshit from the beginning.)

but see, i also never said anything like “pd is no good because it lacks xyz, miller really screwed up there.”

i said something like, “huh, it actually would be handy to have a more powerful ‘score’ feature right there in the environment, and it would be easy to add. i’m glad i read this forum because it helped me to realize this.”

and look, puredata does have score features and data, of course. it has tables and qlist and all kinds of stuff. it’s hard to make cool reactive systems without some concept of state, initial values, so on. it could just use a couple other things. (in my opinion, obviously.)

and the considerations are totally pragmatic. couple weeks back i had a performance where i fired up SC (in emacs, natch), and PD (cause i had some interesting new sounds there), and had them talking so that i could manipulate PD timings in a flexible and efficient way.

i don’t want “livecoding” in PD, i just want some object that takes a script file as an argument and produces (generative/whatever) sequences. it should also accept messages like stop and reset, load foo, whatever. (maybe it has other messages for other arbitrary manipulations.) then i can edit the script with an editor instead of clicking around, and i can still run my piece by launching a single process instead of the high-wire act of running multiple JACK clients in linux on stage.

i can’t imagine any of this is very controversial.

@rick_monster
hm, good point about GC and timing. what i’ve done with lua is write the timer system in C, using posix nanosleep and clock_monotonic. this gives maximally precise callbacks. each C callback passes an event back to the main thread that is running lua and then lua gets its own callback. lua can set/unset or manipulate timer parameters. if lua gets hung up with GC, it might make a single callback finish too slowly but it won’t cause drift.

a limitation is that changes to delta-time from within a lua callback won’t take effect until the current sleep has completed (timer has already gone to sleep when lua gets its event.)

i’ve no idea if that makes sense!

i’m gonna keep thinking about this (not too hard)

i’m also gonna try Purr Data.

2 Likes
#91

wow, just saw this! i took this class in the year 2001. brought in my tibook (first gen osx), miller tried to compile pd on it (obvs didn’t work in one go…)

4 Likes
#93

Yes, agree with you completely. I didn’t think you were complaining, I wanted to add some context and instead have derailed the conversation :slight_smile: Carry on…

#95

At first glance it seems pretty nifty to me. What contributes an unusual flavor that makes it an acquired taste?

#97

“derailed” ? i don’t even know what that means! :smile_cat:

i guess my reaction is just that this “reactive system” vs “determinate composition” is very much a false dichotomy. dig a little more into what they were actually thinking about at IRCAM in 1989. (i mean, we’re talking about a program run by pierre boulez.) they wanted to extract “high-level” musical parameters from a live performer, giving that performer direct and realtime control over the interpretation of an “electronic score.”

(it’s the european classical paradigm: a “score” is fixed and discretized data, but almost everyone would agree that the score is not really the music, and the performer brings it to life by articulating it dynamically.)

to my mind, this is not a big leap from developments in the modular world. (maybe a little more conservative.) i can speak most directly to the buchla systems, which started out including both relatively simple CV-sequencing components (which still gave you dynamic and arbitrary controls over sequence values and positions) with envelope detectors. then there was the MARF and timing detectors. then there was MIDAS, which basically digitized the MARF. and there were integrated one-off devices to combine event detection and event generation.

IWF and MAX were iterating on IRCAM’s 4x system and MIDI studio, and i think they mark a technological turning point; computers were suddenly fast enough that two things could happen: 1) you didn’t necessarily need to decouple score generation from sound generation any more, 2) you could extract higher-level audio features than “just” amplitude, timing and pitch, in realtime.

but a big shift conceptually / aesthetically? i dunno.

i guess i just don’t like using simple pigeon-holes for such remarkably accomplished and flexible creative tools and engineering works. (i don’t much care about whether a signal graph is represented graphically or textually.)

(for anyone who hasn’t seen it, this is an interesting paper and a quick read)

so yeah, MAX was designed as a consumer of MIDI data from the IWF. but that was many, many years ago! there is no reason whatsoever not to have both functionalities in one process. i’d even argue that miller’s cool innovation was to do exactly that; opcode’s MAX was a step backward.

arrg, you got me

7 Likes
#98

so cool, and this is the deep end
here, and in this thread


it’s clear that you all are helping each other :slight_smile:
image.jpeg3024×3024 2.29 MB

to help all of us
:slight_smile: respect and thanks

2 Likes
#99

It sounds as if many of y’all are looking for i-score, although I have only dug into it deeply enough myself that I won’t be surprised if you’ve all abandoned it for its inscrutability.

#100

ha! funny, as a tool, the introduction of something like i-score into the workflow is almost exactly the opposite of what i’m looking for. :slight_smile:

but its cool you bring it up because i do think it’s interesting to model musical structures with petri nets. they’ve been kicking this around for a while; this '07 paper references work back to '89 (http://articles.ircam.fr/textes/Allombert07a/index.pdf) you can definitely see the boulez…

but i-score is massive overkill for my compositional needs (which are simple enough), and i’d guess most people’s. it is truly the kitchen sink of time structure manipulation; tons upon tons of GUI and you can write javascript for event logic and whatnot… i’d be happy with any little scripting language that has records, routines, first-class functions, and access to an accurate sleep() or schedule() or whatever.

i got purr data. it’s nice that they packaged up all those externals, but can’t say i love the very slow new javascript UI. boy oh boy it is slow. it might be a deal breaker; i like my puredata lean and mean, running on a netbook.

1 Like
#101

We’re totally on the same page. I also don’t believe that it’s a dichotomy, nor was I trying to present it that way… more of a fluid spectrum… that’s all. In fact, my favourite way to work is to combine tools that favour different ways of working and mash them all together. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#102

Spoken like an interaction designer. :wink:

4 Likes
#103

I tried latest version of Pd and, for the first time, Deken yesterday.

I’m glad to see an integrated package manager of sorts in Pd but it appears to be a bit half baked.

For instance I installed pdlua discussed earlier in this thread using Deken. After installing I could create a [pdlua] object instantly.

Then I installed creb, a favourite library of mine. But creb objects - like [blosc~] - could not be created until i added [declare -stdpath creb] (the same thing as adding it in preferences).

There is not much documentation on Deken whereas Pd vanilla otherwise IMO has great docs.

How come I needed do declare for creb but not pdlua? Aren’t libraries supposed to be added automatically by Deken?

#104

Externals handling is a weird thing in Pd… did you add the path to the list in the Pd settings?

#105

I created a “declare” object in my patch instead of configuring, which AFAIK does the same thing.

But according to the docs, if the “use standard extensions” checkbox in settings is checked (which it is by default) stuff in extra/ should load automatically:
‘If “use standard extensions” is enabled, the usual “extras” directory is also searched. This contains standard external objects like “expr” and “fiddle”, and perhaps much more depending on the distribution of Pd you’re using.’

Deken installs fetched packages into subdirectories of “extra”. What I do not get is why I need to configure stuff after Deken has downloaded. For creb I have to but ie for pdlua I don’t need to do anything.

Anyway, it works out with some configuration.

#106

I am wondering as well… I had to manually add all the paths to the externals in Pd to be able to just add them by typing the abstraction/binary name in an object box. Otherwise they will get picked up automatically, but I need to specify the path. So for example instead of [output~] I’d have to write [iemlib/output~]
But maybe we are talking about two different things…

#107

because sometimes certain -libs load everything and other times you need a -path

#109

Very cool! Looking forward seeing more examples!

#112

that post by @jasonw22 about the mother-desktop organelle patch sent me on a quest to make a monome adapter for the organelle. so far i’m mimicing a keyboard on the botton row, going to try and get faders working during lunch.

5 Likes
#113

running into issues with pd vanilla/deken imports on my os x machine. current fix is any plugin that is in a folder (ex: ~/Library/Pd/mrpeach or ~/Library/Pd/cyclone) you need to add the full folder path to Pd’s path. once i did that the it fixed the import errors coming from pd-extended on windows. not sure if there’ a better fix.

#114

monome_organelle.zip (5.6 KB)

pretty rough cut, but i was haing a good time with it! top four rows are faders that map to knob 1-4 bottom left button acts as the select button, and then bottom right is a keyboard.

going to try and figure out how to send the current knob values to the faders, if anyone ends up downloading and has suggestions about how to improve the press handling i’m all ears :smile:

3 Likes
#115

:slightly_smiling_face: you probably seen this…

http://www.monologx.com/xodular/