On 19-Feb-06, at 7:29 AM, Perry R Cook wrote:
3) As long as ChucK writes soundfiles without clicks, we can revisit that most magical time in computer music history when everyone used an algorithmic, text-based language, and listened to the result after it was rendered. Real-time is awesome, but expressive code is universally powerful, and the latter will become the former if we just wait a spell.
That's certainly true for certain types of projects, but it means that chuck is locked out of the interactive music area. This whole benchmarking idea was sparked when I was trying to get three shepherd tones whose speed changed in realtime (a human with a KiOm, if you're interested). I was using 7 sine waves per tone, so a total of 21 sine waves. Add in a bit of math (to determine frequencies, set gains, and handle midi input), and my poor 1Ghz CPU was overloaded. In the end I had to make do with only two tones. That's not a terrible thing in and of itself -- this was just a weekly assignment -- but I was disappointed that a modern laptop couldn't handle 21 (interesting) sine waves. I even considered doing all the sound processing in pd -- have chuck send OSC messages to pd to control sine wave generators in pd. For this project it wasn't necessary, but I might revisit this idea.
PS: Wonder how many sines Max/MSP will spin?
I just did some tests on a lab computer. CPU usage was set to "automatic"; I couldn't change that to automatic due to lack of administrator access. G5, 2 ghz, 10.4.something chuck 150 Max/MSP approx 580 Cheers, - Graham