First was Tuesday, the Lisp-NYC MuSIG dedicate to making music
algorithmically with Lisp. This reporter was late, which did not matter
because the discussion of composer Drew Krause's Common Music code went
completely over this reporter's head (music-wise).
Man, I thought programming was technical. :) The good news is that
LispNYK Bob Coyne was there and he knows music pretty well (I could not
understand him, either) so not all is lost.
Forunately (for my morale) just before we broke composer Howard Elmer
mentioned it would be nice to be able to experiment with compositions
via an interface with GUI elements linked to the parameters a composer
might like to tweak. It turns out I had been playing with using Cello
the Portable Common Lisp GUI to pop up on demand an ad hoc interface
with a minimum of extra scripting. This sounded good to Drew as well,
and as a message from God someone from the CM mailing list just
yesterday posted code for a new instrument and included code to pop up a
GUI interface (in Motif) by which the instrument can be controlled in
real-time. This capability is built into CM, but I gather few use it and
this contribution has been met with interest by the CM community. The
code looks like this:
>(defun make-it-go (&key (reload nil))
> (when reload
> (reloadr))
> (make-controller "stochasticRTw"
> '(on-off "go" :toggle t)
> '(0 "" :separator)
> '(xwig "xwig" :slider 0 10)
> '(ywig "ywig" :slider 0 100)
> '(xfb "xfb" :slider 0 1.0)
> '(xmn "xmin" :int-slider 1 256)
> '(xmx "xmax" :int-slider 1 256)
> '(0 "" :separator 8 :no-line)
> '(wave "waveform" :graph)
> '(fftwave "fft" :graph))
> (shell "./stochasticRTw &")
> (with-psound (:srate 44100)(stochasticRT-w-fft)))
Which is pretty much what my Cello-based stuff looks like. Drew will be
working down the hall from CM creator Rick Taube, so if we get anywhere
with the Lisp-NYC MuGUI maybe the CM community will pick it up as more
portable/extensible.
btw, at the meeting Howard gave us all mad cool holiday presents of two
CDs of his work, one a classical-like bit performed by the Royal
Liverpool Philmarnonic, another (which I am listening to now) called
Dimensional Drumming. I may try jamming to the latter with my djembe
later on (but before the neighbors get back from work).
Now here's a shocker: walking away from Howard's afterwards, Drew
expressed interest in RoboCup! His idea is to generate music from the
stream of numbers describing play. He felt there would be a nice blend
of randomness yet order. I told Drew that logs of championship sim games
could be downloaded and played back, or teams themselves could be built
and played in new games to generate original info, and then TeamKenny
(already running under CMUCL/Linux, which is Drew's platform) could be
converted into a monitor and so it would get all information, which
could then be sent back out to CM/CLM for musical rendering. How sick is
that?
Ideally we get the SuperCollider server working so this can be played in
real-time, instead of running, stopping, and then playing the resulting
MIDI.
Speaking of which, yesterday I did successfully exchange my first
messages with the Supercollider server (under win32) and now I just have
to figure out why nothing but the init message works. :) But I have a
theory and I have not even hit the SCServer list for support, so it
should be easy.
;;;-------------------------------------------------------------
;;; Page Two
;;;
Then last night the burgeoning FixSIG held Meeting #0 to see if we
should go for plusp meeting #s, and it looks like a lock. Russ McManus
explained all to an overflow audience (with more than a few unable to
attend but expressing great interest). As it turned out, a couple of
attendees were well-versed on the subject, sufficiently to leave me in
the dark for a second night running, and I once wrote a foreign exchange
system (but for the back-office).
It looks as if the scope of the task of building an exchange simulator
is reasonable enough that we can at get a "Hello world" exchange running
with unsophisticated autonomous traders to generate volume in short
order and then shop it around to university financial engineering
departments to see if there is any interest in taking the project to the
next level.
As a message from God, my Dice job-hunting demon dropped off a FIX
opening the same day.
;;-----------------------------------------------
;; Page three
Obviously we have to look at transforming trading activity into music. <g>
kt
--
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> Obviously we have to look at transforming trading activity into music. <g>
"And as for the proposed module for converting incoming Dow Jones
stock-market information into MIDI data in real time, he'd only meant that
as a joke ..."
Douglas Adams -- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
;-)
Marcus Pearce <·····@soi.city.ac.uk> writes:
>> Obviously we have to look at transforming trading activity into music. <g>
>
> "And as for the proposed module for converting incoming Dow Jones
> stock-market information into MIDI data in real time, he'd only meant that
> as a joke ..."
>
> Douglas Adams -- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
>
> ;-)
Wow, I had TOTALLY forgotten about that sentence. I'll look at the code
over the weekend, BTW. This week has been quite crazy (though mostly in
a good way :).
--
Rahul Jain
·····@nyct.net
Professional Software Developer, Amateur Quantum Mechanicist