Greetings Mark and all,
From: Mark Knecht <markknecht@xxxxxxxxx>
BTW - I tried Chuck for the first time this morning, just using a few
examples to see how it worked. It built cleanly for Linux-Jack and
came up working right away with no xruns. Since I'm not a programmer
I'll probably never make effective use of it, unless someone builds
some synths, but it seems like a very interesting way to try to build
real synths such as those in Reaktor. I'm excited, but also worried
I'll never make it useful. Anyway, for those programming types out
there, if I can make sounds in 10 minutes I think you could make music
in 30!
This semester we taught the PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra),
using ChucK and Max/MSP, to 14 freshman undergraduates, most
of whom had no prior programming experience:
http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/
By the 2nd week, they were creating programs synthesizing
generative drum machines and performing them on-the-fly:
http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/listen/machines/
Long before the end of the semester, the plorkists were all very
comfortable writing code, controlling physical models, using various
controllers (keyboards, triggerfingers, wacom tablets, light/pressure
sensors), building instruments out of processed vocal and acoustic
instrumental sounds, and networking and synchronizing multiple
machines together.
It is our hope that ChucK can be useful to researchers,
composers, and performers alike, providing different
paradigms for seasoned programmers and yet (hopefully)
clear and well-defined syntax/semantic to make it fun and
interesting for inexperienced coders. It seems so far that
as long as one is really interested in sound synthesis and
creating music, learning and using ChucK well is pretty
straightforward, the command line-friendly way of working
seems to present steeper learning curves than the language
itself. However, if one is already using Linux, the command
line obviously isn't an obstacle.
In the case of PLOrk, ChucK pretty quickly became a
second nature to the users. Programming should be as
simple and clear as possible, the only complexity should be
that which lies in the creativity and invention of the
programmer. It's unlikely that this goal is being totally
achieved in ChucK, but it is certainly something we are
striving towards.
Best,
Ge!
