Text-based audio programming ?

Does anyone here use one?
Has anyone here used one?

So far I've favour Audiomulch (absolutely fantastic - http://www.audiomulch.com/ ) for live and generating material and Pro Tools for editing, and shied away from even the more difficult GUI based stuff like Max/MSP and PureData. Overall I'd prefer to just use hardware and tape all up, but it's pretty prohibitive to do so around town, let along overseas.

However studying abroad this semester, and the teacher where I'm at has had a programming hand in Csound ( http://www.flossmanuals.net/csound/index ). To be honest it looks fucking terrifying, though after seeing some simple oscillators and stuff being demonstrated I am fairly intrigued. In addition I saw a performance of Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) and Blixa Bargeld, and was well impressed with the live manipulation, looping and generative stuff going on (I believe AN uses SuperCollider?).

Anyway, what do you know? It can't be all basses through guitar amps.

jesusonic has a mini-plugin language you can use to make stuff from within the actual program.
would anyone here be interested in a simplified max/msp puredata, though?

(i get the feeling people using this stuff rather enjoy that the riff raff are kept out by how difficult it is to use)

ChucK is quite easy to get started with, particularly the miniAudicle IDE/runtime environment.

(I used ChucK/miniAudicle for a simple livecoding album project last year)

xp like TOPLAP - sometimes I get the feeling they're being obscure just to keep this as their own exclusive club.

I will be watching this thread, because I always liked the idea of these things (I write perl scripts for a living and spend the rest of the time thinking about music and being sad that I can't make it very well), but could never get into them.

I bought a giant CSound book for £1 in a closing down sale and it sits on my shelf making me feel guilty for never getting past page 3. This was a decade ago, so I imagine it's pretty out of date now.

Think an acquaintance does live audio stuff in Lua. I've never actually seen him do it, which is a shame, as I'd quite like to see if it actually is interesting to watch, or if it's just a lot of minor tweaks happening very slowly, with the occasional bit of swearing when sound stops unexpectedly or a noiseburst erupts through the speakers and makes the soundguy cut everyone off.

There's a great article here, Hacking Perl in Nightclubs. I don't know too much about Perl, and couldn't get much out of the code the author provides. But it does give a great feel for livecoding in general.

what would you guys feel about an application that opened up this kind of stuff to people who don't know coding at all?
(not even processing.org level coding)

I think it would be great to have something simpler for people to get into. ChucK is the easiest in my experience. Trouble is that most livecoding languages and environments are developed in small groups with the needs and preferences of those groups as the driving force. An analogy would be Linux in the early days - a lot of obscure stuff to learn before you could really do anything, even basic stuff.

I was thinking the metaphor of plugging inputs into outputs of puredata would be really intuitive to people used to plugging physical effects boxes into each other, but for some reason it's not quite so easy in practice. I would like to make a simplified (maybe dumbed-down) version that would make it easy, but I think I'd have to invent an audience for it, because it's not something I feel the dude on the street is exactly clamoring for.

A few years ago I did a couple of albums using Reaktor and techniques similar to those discussed here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfGR0q3jUiw
...mixed in with some Lunetta ideas. I've also used the Nord Modular demo software to do similar stuff.

interesting... i wonder if there'd be a market for an LFO-based sound toy. (maybe presenting it as a toy is the way to go about gently thrusting it upon the masses)

try ixiQuarks. it's a supercollider environment that runs independently of sc and it's free! let's you do live coding and stuff like that, alongside some excellent granular and spectral tools

http://www.ixi-software.net/content/body_software_ixiquarks.html

there's also ixiLang which I haven't tried yet but looks cool

http://www.ixi-software.net/content/software.html

c-sound / max / pd are all super cool if there's something really specific you want to do, also fun to experiement with, but half the time unless you'ev built yourself a nice library of readymade stuff everything just ends up taking FOREVER to build

interesting... i wonder if there'd be a market for an LFO-based sound toy. (maybe presenting it as a toy is the way to go about gently thrusting it upon the masses)

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, April 14, 2011 10:49 PM (2 years ago)

http://patchblocks.com/
Small hardware modules that can be linked together, and are connected to a computer for programming with a Pure Data-ish visual programming IDE.

And on the more hardware end, these from Korg
http://littlebits.cc/kits/synth-kit

(I'm not involved with either project, BTW)