PureData

My department, as most music departments, have been teaching software in a computer lab with a bunch of commercial (expensive) software: Notation: Finale, Sibelius Sound editing, mixing: Logic, Digital Performer, Pro Tools Sound programming: Max Writing: MS Word Spreadsheet: MS Excel Analysis: Matlab, SPSS The free software community has developed rapidly in the last years, and I now see that there are good, free and cross-platform software covering a lot of the functionality of the above-mentioned programs: ...

I have written about my making of a series of sreencasts of basic sound synthesis in puredata in an earlier blog post. The last addition to the series is the building of a patch that shows how a simple impulse response, combined with a delay, a feedback loop and a low pass filter, can be used to simulate reverberation. In fact, dependent on the settings, this patch can also be used for making phasor, flanger, chorus and echo as well. It is interesting to see how these concepts are just variations of the same thing. ...

I am teaching two courses this semester: Sound theory 1 (in English) Sound analysis (in Norwegian, together with Rolf Inge Godøy) In both courses I use Pure Data (PD) for demonstrating various interesting phenomena (additive synthesis, beating, critical bands, etc.), and the students also get various assignments to explore such things themselves. There are several PD introduction videos on YouTube in English, but I found that it could be useful to also have something in Norwegian. So far I have made three screencasts going through the basics of PD and sound synthesis: ...

Another post from the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. Yesterday I saw a demo on the Audioscape project by Mike Wozniewski (McGill). He was using the Gumstix, a really small system running a Linux version called OpenEmbedded. He was running PDa (a Pure Data clone) and was able to process sensor data and run audio off of the small device.

I held a guest lecture at the speech, music and hearing group at KTH in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and got a tour of the lab afterwards. There I got a demonstration of the Optitrack optical motion capture system, which, as compared to other similar systems, is an amazingly cheap solution starting at $4999. Obviously, it has lower accuracy and precision than the larger systems, but then it also costs 1/20 of the price… However, 100 Hz speed and millimeter precision is decent for a USB-based system, and the cameras are really portable (10x5 cm or so each). The best thing was that the KTH people had written a small program sending OSC in realtime, and they showed a demo where the system would control a PD patch on another computer.

Many people often question whether Max/MSP, PD and other graphical environments can be considered programming languages. Claude Heiland-Allen proves that PD is a full programming language by making an interpreter in vanilla Pd using no externals.