I’m back to hacking haskell now, results hopefully before this Saturday when I’m playing at the make.art festival in Poitiers.  I won’t be livecoding in Haskell itself (it seems dynamic programming in Haskell is a bit up in the air while work on the ghc API goes on), instead I’m writing a parser for a language for live coding vocable rhythms.  It’s interesting designing a computer language centered around phonology…

First, dorkcamp is a lovely event in its third year.  The idea is for around 60 of us to go to a campsite an hour out of London, well equipped with showers, toilets, a big kitchen and hall, and do fun dorky stuff like soldering and knitting.  It happens at the end of August, tickets are running low so grab yours now.  More info on the website and wiki.

Second here’s a new demo, this time with two drum simulations, one high and one low:

By the way you might notice that vocable records everything you do under the ‘logs’ directory.  I’d be really interested in seeing your log files and the dorky words and funky rhythms you are typing in.  Please send me a copy if you don’t mind — don’t be shy now…

Abstract:
In the context of the live coding of music and computational creativity, literature examining perceptual relationships between text, speech and instrumental sounds are surveyed, including the use of vocable words in music. A system for improvising polymetric rhythms with vocable words is introduced, together with a working prototype for producing rhythmic continuations within the system. This is shown to be a promising direction for both text based music improvisation and research into creative agents.

Full details here:

http://www.pawfal.org/openlab/index.php?page=OpenLab4

As ever, feedback, both positive and negative is very much appreciated!

The idea is to be able to make instrumental sounds by typing onomatopoeic words. (extra explanation added in the comments)

Here’s my first ever go at playing with it:

For a fuller, more readable experience you’re better off looking at the higher quality avi than the above flash transcoding.

As before, I’m using HSC3 to do the synthesis. If anyone’s interested, I plan to release the full source in September, but the synthesis part is available here

Sounds a bit nicer now… This time with a smaller font and an exciting slither of my desktop visible. Sorry about that, see it a bit bigger over here