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Overtone

jng.imagine27.com

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Re: Overtone

#61

Post by palish »

SwellJoe wrote: post #58
palish wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mm, I didn't mean to come off as a dick. Overtone is cool as hell, and is worthy of a lot of respect. My point was, there's a reason why musicians often use "a box with a bigass row of large physical keys" to do this sort of thing. That said, a synth costs thousands of dollars; so I love the idea of Overtone making live music more accessible to "dabblers" like me. ( Unfortunately, a MacBook also costs thousands of do…

You could say the same of every new instrument ever. Why use a piano when a harpsichord is so much simpler to build? (Louder, mostly, but that's not my point. And pianos were much more expensive than any previous instrument when they were new.) Why build a harpsichord if you have stringed instruments? Why put strings on an instrument...why not just bang on that stick. New instruments provide new means of expression n…

Erm... The piano allowed dynamic volume; a serious improvement over the harpsichord.

I hate to pick at your example, 'cause I agree with you in spirit. Your harpsichord/piano example was just... Well, exactly my point. The piano was a major improvement over the harpsi; I hope the same will be said of Overtone. That's all.

Re: Overtone

#62

Post by samaaron »

dplakon wrote: post #39

Max/MSP is this times a million. check it out if you haven't heard of it. cycling74.com it does the exact same things but with more options, complexity, and a more usable interface. It also has visual fx.

Max is very cool - however the biggest issue for me is its lack of support for abstractions. This typically results in an insanely complicated visual program for everything except for the most trivial examples.

One of the core goals for Overtone is to provide the means for musicians to share their ideas through a programming-language-like notation. This means readability and understandability are at least, if not more important, to expressiveness with the language.

Overtone should be easy to grok, not appear to be some cryptic puzzle.

Re: Overtone

#63

Post by mhax »

marquis wrote: post #15
wylie wrote: post #5

I'm so glad that somebody built a better front-end for SuperCollider. It's badly in need of a better guide and tutorial for new users, and this seems like an excellent way to go about it.

Is SuperCollider really that complicated? I've seen some incredible things built with it by musicians who have learnt to code specifically for it.

I would say yes, SC really is that complicated. sclang borrows from a bunch of different programming philosophies, so you have declarative stuff alongside imperative stuff, plus it is flexible to the extreme, with various 'equivalent' syntax constructs to achieve the same thing, and innumerable 'shortcuts'. Meaning that it's very easy to write obscure, hard to read code. Plus, it's not just a matter of knowing sclang - the whole sever graph architecture needs to be understood to really 'know' SC. I think there are probably very few people that really understand all of it.

Re: Overtone

#64

Post by dbattaglia »

DonnyV wrote: post #27

I'm not really sure what you would use this for. I'm a musician and I can't possibly find any use for this. It would take forever to write a song in this and then you would have to mess with the timings just to make it not sound like a programmed piece of music and give it some feel.

From the traditional perspective of composing/songwriting or performance using acoustic instruments, this would probably seem useless. But there is a whole world of folks obsessed with coding music and instruments, check out Chuck, CSound, Max/MSP or Supercollider (which this uses as it's audio backend).

I like to think of projects like this as experimentation in technology-as-art. Even if the sound itself isn't what I would use to write songs, I still find it very satisfying to watch someone write out Lisp/Clojure code and hear organized sound come back. And I'm sure that is amplified by a million for the person who actually created this themselves!

Re: Overtone

#66

Post by agumonkey »

samaaron wrote: post #20
Raphael wrote: post #9

Interesting how his command line glows and shows CRT-like distortions. Is that actually how it looks, or is that post-processing applied to the video?

Sadly it's just post-processign FX. However, a terminal that looked like that would be totally badass.

The glow fits very well with the flymake (i guess) flashing.

In theory a ~compiz composite plugin for this purpose wouldnt be hard to create, if it doesn't already exists. And Qt seems capable of glowing to.. time to patch Konsole.

Re: Overtone

#68

Post by kragen »

palish wrote: post #57
kragen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think live coding makes live music more accessible to dabblers. Making live music that people enjoy listening to only takes a few dozen to a few hundred hours of instruction and practice, with either voice or instruments, and beyond the obvious a capella modalities, there's the harmonica, the borrowed friend's guitar, the recorder, the pan pipes, and so on, which together mean you can make pretty excellent mu…

Ha! A $100 synth from RadioShack is precisely what I use. It even has "RadioShack" engraved into it. Honestly I was just trying to find some good things to say about Overtone, since creativity is always a great thing and should be encouraged. Maybe a combination of the two ideas: Overtone functions being invoked by pressing keys on a synth, with pressure/speed of the keypress being passed as function args. (But then…

The possibilities of algorithmic music are different from the possibilities of direct human performance.

Re: Overtone

#69

Post by FuzzyDunlop »

This really interests me, being a musician as well. The idea of coding music (and not just programming a synth or whatever) has never occurred to me before and I really fancy spending an evening or two with this to see what happens.

My only dislike with increasingly virtual instruments, however, is that I don't really get the same sort of involvement out of using them. I can bang out some fairly decent beats with my PadKontrol but it makes me long for my old, battered drum kit, and the band practices where I'd lay down a beat and just let myself get lost in it all as the guitarists and bassist improvised over it.

What you gain in technology (and all the amazing things you can do with it) you lose in that sense of physicality.

Re: Overtone

#70

Post by yaxu »

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #69

This really interests me, being a musician as well. The idea of coding music (and not just programming a synth or whatever) has never occurred to me before and I really fancy spending an evening or two with this to see what happens. My only dislike with increasingly virtual instruments, however, is that I don't really get the same sort of involvement out of using them. I can bang out some fairly decent beats with my…

A big part of Sam Aaron's research is into integrating interfaces like the monome into live coding languages.
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