[sc-users] Happy 2006!

[James Harkins <jamshark70@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just wanted to share something I've been toying with, kind of a welcome 
to 2006 present perhaps. A short teaser, a sketch of a housey number 
I've been working on as an antidote for the winter blues. Every so 
often I get tired of making serious music and I just gotta have da 
funk.

http://www.dewdrop-world.net/audio/techno-link-demo.mp3

Apropos of recent discussions of code design--for quite some time I've 
wanted a way to link sequencing processes together, so that one can 
control the behavior of one or more others. Also I wanted the binding 
to be dynamic so I can make and break the links in real time (that part 
needs a bit more work). Here you're hearing a bassline driving a 
chordal process, so that the chords sound only when the filter envelope 
gets triggered. I can change the go/no-go condition any time along with 
other parameters that can modify the behavior of the child stream(s) on 
the fly.

For me, this is huge. With some more practice, I should be able to run 
streams of meta-events that control rapid-fire changes of texture, 
establish rhythmic relationships between layers, describe a 
slower-moving harmonic progression that other processes fill out in 
different ways, and probably even generate counterpoint 
algorithmically. (Yes, I will release the code structure ... 
eventually.)

The chords will probably not make it into the final piece--I borrowed 
them for testing purposes from another piece that's in a different key. 
To change the key, I only had to do this: Mode(\tech1) => BP(\clav2) -- 
done.

... the point being to back up Felix's point about design. Because I 
spent a good part of the past year working on a framework to help me 
manipulate streams and patterns, I was able to prototype this in a 
matter of days. Not that every piece needs that level of new code ... I 
guess what I'm trying to say is that by stumbling toward and eventually 
settling on a consistent working method (this framework is my third 
attempt), I'm now able to sketch out ideas very fast. Some of the drum 
patterns, for instance, I could sketch out in about 10 lines of code. 
And changing the key of the chords with one command was a special 
thrill.

That's my experience ... it really does work! But you have to be 
patient about it too--my first couple of interface designs were 
failures :-}  ... for me it was part of the process of discovering what 
my requirements were.

hjh

: H. James Harkins
: jamshark70@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
: http://www.dewdrop-world.net
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"Come said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted,
Sing me the universal."  -- Whitman