#Pure Data

[outtacontextlitwtc]

"Drop outta school. Do drugs. With me. Tonight."

Will Wood, Pure Data

.

[unrulymusic]

Composer / guitarist Bryan Jacobs and I started playing music together in 2022. From the jump, our duo has felt like a perfect fit: we share an enthusiasm for dense, knotty music, and structured-but-unpredictable rhythms. And we think in similar ways about the instruments we use to improvise, and the performer’s relationship to technology. 

First, we both use home-brewed software to enhance our abilities as performers. For instance, Bryan’s electronics can transform a simple guitar lick into an impossibly fast cascade of notes, while my software facilitates closely-tuned microtonal scales that don’t map onto a traditional keyboard layout. Second, we’re both interested in software with a degree of autonomy. The electronics make musical decisions (based on the algorithms we’ve designed), and we as performers both adapt to and shape the materials that our instruments generate. We intertwine the real-time decision-making of improvisation with the slow and considered choices of composition - expressing the latter in the code we write and run.

And then we complicate things further by getting into a room together and playing our instruments side-by-side. At which point there’s way more than enough stimulus to react to and bounce off of. Lightning quick, and yet inexorably pulled by gravity, our favorite metaphor for this work is Pinball. Plug a quarter into the machine and hear the results...

[tenshunnoise]

i uploaded some new experiments with Pure data on my bandcamp page and Archive site.

give it a listen if your ears are feeling curious!

https://archive.org/details/puredataexperimentalcomposions3

[anti-bad-pro-good]

A snippet of something I made Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qARva8LxEoo&t=89s

[josiah-theory]

Oops, Nearly 4 Months Went By

Yikes! Hello!

I guess I should summarize how the past 4 months have gone, music/theory-wise.

I began work once more on my music theory library, Harmonica, in Python, which hadn't been touched in some time. Then, I grew frustrated with Python and learned Rust, and began writing the library in Rust. That's how a lot of June and July went.

Then, over a month ago, I started messing with Pure Data again for the first time since 2020, after listening to some Autechre and watching some computer music talks and going, hey I want to create my own music tools from the ground up again. I grew frustrated with programming logic in Pure Data, so I decided to take a swing at SuperCollider again for the first time since 2017.

At first I was moreso focused on learning to use SuperCollider to, y'know, make sounds - learning the DSP tools and the client-server architecture, etc. Then, in recent weeks, I've been focusing more specifically on sclang, the programming language of the SuperCollider environment. Now, as of a week ago, I've been writing my library, Harmonica, as a SuperCollider extension.

My, quite the language-hopping this library has gone through. My rationale for writing it in SuperCollider is that I feel I may as well use it in an environment that's already specifically geared towards making music/sound experiments. After all, the nature of this project is just that: experimental. Also, I always suspected that my music theory explorations would be best suited towards algo music.

Also, sclang seems so far to be a genuinely competent programming language in its own right. I mean... it's also very... quirky (Quarky?) and I must say, coming from Rust, I am VERY underwhelmed by its error reporting. Overall though... so far so good. The gist of sclang is that it's very OOP, but also very functional and has first class functions. So actually, pretty similar to rust in some aspects!

I will say though, SuperCollider's reputation as a slow-burn of an environment with a steep learning curve is not unwarranted - good LORD it takes a lot of work to get going in this environment! Pure Data, as esoteric and opaque as it looks (those patches you see on YouTube with the million erratic lines connecting confusingly labeled boxes across the screen) is much more plug-n-play in comparison.

Alright, that's all I've got for you. Maybe some day I'll have some actual examples to share. Here's to another 4 months! Or, well, hopefully less this time.

[steveherenow]

connected the melody.motivator to the sample.sensei going through the vox.vizier

[steveherenow-old]

connected the melody.motivator to the sample.sensei going through the vox.vizier

[81c1fcbuffer]

via <3

[kathardman]

Old clothes and rags, each with special significance, woven into a technological carpet which can reproduce those memories through sound.

Using the Bela microcontroller and the Trill touch sensor package, alongside conductive e-textile fibers (so expensive! what a joy to use them again.) this carpet interfaces with a pure data patch to reproduce voice recordings of important memories. These sounds, however, are not perfect recollections, but are warped and cut apart fragments, partially forgotten.

By weaving these materials and sounds into this carpet, we've created a solidified memory. Now, without deluding ourselves into thinking we've made a perfect copy, we can hold what we remember of these memories in our hands, forever.

Created by Viktoria Angyal, Salma Aly, Maria Konstantinova, and me, Kathrine Hardman (in no particular order).

Produced as part of the Fashionable Technologies I course at Interface Cultures, taught by Malte Bergmann, and Maxi Fröbel. My special thanks go out to them :)

More info: minodu.notion.site/Carpet-of-memories-3f12110166254cb7beda6caf6b519c0a

[outtacontextlitwtc]

" i went 'uwu' to this hello fresh guy"

[spongebobsquarepusher]

tonight, i learn about pure data

[tomato0cherry]

Pure.Data and Prototype.Distortion 

[reubeningall]

Improvisation using no-input mixer, stylophone, loopers, and my drum synth (pure data on raspberry pi) + midi controller. I have updated my drum synth patch to add a (non-quantised) tap-a-pattern function for the kick drum hence the wonk.

The visualisation is a Lissajous figure, produced by software called PrettyScope.

[steveherenow]

12/23/2024: this was the sequencerer prototype after 2 weeks of learning PlugData

[steveherenow-old]

19 songs aleatorically generated during development of one ever expanding patch.