ChucKian greetings and updates!
Dear all, Greetings from the ChucK team - all the best wishes in the coming year! I want to take this opportunity to bring you up to date on things of ChucKian nature, and also to address what's next. I hope this reads more like um cliff notes than a newsletter (because the latter can seem really boring)! It has been a fairly insane year for all of us at the ChucK team, ranging from new research, an expanding community, a new lorchestra, publications (including a dissertation), to ChucK helping to power a new startup making crazy sonic software for the iPhone. Here is a partial summary, mostly in a strongly-timed ordering: * Continuing our investigation on audio analysis in ChucK: Rebecca, Perry, and I have begun to explore new directions involving on-the-fly learning and support for MIR prototyping in ChucK. Check out the all new sMIRk and publications: http://smirk.cs.princeton.edu/ * PLOrk's west coast offspring/sibling, SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra) was instantiated; ChucK is used as the primary platform for instrument design, sound design/synthesis, and teaching: http://slork.stanford.edu/ http://slork.stanford.edu/media/ * By the way, PLOrk is about to enter a new level of insanity in spring 2009, with an MacArthur-supported campaign that features an fully expanded, rebuilt ensemble and an unbelievable lineup (Matmos, So Percussion, and Laurie Anderson): http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/ * PhD Dissertation: "The ChucK Audio Programming Language: An On-the-fly, Strongly-timed Environ/mentality" was completed, almost fatally injuring its author and his PhD committee in the process: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~gewang/thesis.html * Smule was found in Summer 2008, exploring what we call "Interactive Sonic Media", starting with the iPhone. ChucK on the iPhone (ChiP) serves as the core platform and engine. Perry, Spencer, Rebecca, and I are all part of the madness: http://www.smule.com/ http://www.smule.com/about/ http://ocarina.smule.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfrONZjakRY&fmt=18 * Meanwhile, the ChucK community continues to grow both in and out of academia. We especially would like to call out the inspiring efforts of Kassen (sporksperson, forum moderator, and ChucKian sherpa), Inventor, Stephen Sinclair, Ajay Kapur, Adam Tindale, Paul Botelho, Dan Trueman, PLOrk/SLOrk, and others for the immense guidance, ideas, and creativity they provide on the forum, mailing lists, as well as in classrooms and onstage. ---
From our point of view, it has indeed been a busy year of ChucKing. What's next?
* One common question concerns ChucK on the iPhone. Here is where things stand: ChucK has ported to the iPhone by Smule, and has served as the audio platform behind its products (Sonic Lights, Ocarina, etc.). While ChucK is freely available on OS X, Linux, and Windows (and shall remain so), we have not yet opened ChiP, our ChucK on iPhone engine/port (nor do we license this platform currently). While we can't make any promises, we articulate that the core team would like to explores ways to open ChiP by creating an beneficial environment for everyone (researchers, artists, smule, developers). Again, we can't make any promises and it is a possibility that ChiP will not be open sourced for the foreseeable future, but we genuinely want to make it open and make it work, and are exploring that possibility. * Along this line, we would like to articulate the following point: major general language features that are introduced as part of ChiP *will* be fully released in the main distribution (only iPhone/smule-specific features will remain proprietary for now). This is by design when we structured Smule. You see, most of us at Smule care about, use, and release open-source software, and we genuinely want to build an ecosystem where things can be as open as possible and remain mutually beneficial. We shall keep moving forward in this way. * ChucK releases: it's been a while since the last release, so perhaps not many are holding their breath for the next release. It's coming, for better or for worse!! File IO is finally in place, along with several other features. miniAudicle MAUI for Windows and Linux are nearing completion as well. Stay tuned! * ChucK research, development, and pedagogy continues in full, at Princeton, Stanford, and with quite a few other institutions and individuals. Rebecca leads the charge on MIR/on-the-fly learning/analysis-based performance, new features/uses are developed by Perry, Dan, researchers and students at Princeton, and by us at CCRMA, and now at Smule. At Stanford, we are also working on new systems based on ChucK, code, and interaction to provide new ways of working with audio. Stephen Sinclair, Kassen, Inventor, Ajay Kapur at CalArts, and Adam Tindale in Calgary continue to contribute code and ideas. Admittedly, incorporating contributions has been an issue, and this is squarely my fault for not having better coordinated due to cycle shortages. For what it's worth, I am just going to accept that the load not going to get any better and will endeavor to re-organize! Well, that's all I have for now - and it's amazing if you read this far! Please send all thoughts, complaints, suggestions to the chuck-users list, forum, or just email us!
From all of us on the ChucK team, we wish you a wonderful new year and beyond!
All the best, Ge, on behalf of ChucK team
Dear Ge, I'd like to share some notes on some of the more philosophical points here. That's what a approaching new year will do to you, I suppose like a cross between well wishes and new year's resolutions. * Meanwhile, the ChucK community continues to grow both in and out of
academia.
I think this is great and indeed essential. I briefly addressed a similar point at the round table discussion at STEIM's jamboree. It's my humble opinion that one of the great weaknesses of popular culture is getting stuck in what's fashionable at the moment while one of the great weaknesses of the academic world can be getting stuck in a "ivory tower" with little eye for practical applications. I think keeping in touch with both can bring great benefits for both. "Peer review" is one of the pillars of science and I honestly can't think of a better way to peer review work on subjects like interface design or synthesis methods than putting them on a stage (of whatever kind). Similarly a bit of research can be very beneficial to artistic practice or plain entertainment. I don't mean that as a substitute for a paper or emotional investment at all, but as a tool fo rincreasing the quality of both. I think we are doing very, very well here and that this is a perspective from which we can learn and gain a lot more still in the future.
* Along this line, we would like to articulate the following point: major general language features that are introduced as part of ChiP *will* be fully released in the main distribution (only iPhone/smule-specific features will remain proprietary for now). This is by design when we structured Smule. You see, most of us at Smule care about, use, and release open-source software, and we genuinely want to build an ecosystem where things can be as open as possible and remain mutually beneficial. We shall keep moving forward in this way.
To me this didn't need extra explanation. Clearly the iPhone is more closed then I'd like but I have to recognise that without that aspect and the control it brings it likely never would've gotten as popular as it is. The iPhone is very standardised and popular which brings some very interesting properties. Clearly Smule (amongst others) has been able to bring experimental interfaces to electronic sounds to people who would never otherwise have been interested in such experiments and it has done very well indeed. I think this can only be beneficial. To me it's very funny that a mainstream news source like Fox seemed quite sceptical about using the tilt sensor in laptops for music while a audience that's nearly as mainstream like the iPhone's audience has been delighted by *the exact same thing*. I really don't think the average Ocarina customer is very concerned with maximising the bandwith between the performer's intentions and the sound synthesis parameters (nor should they have to be). To me this is a exact analogy of what I wrote about above and a very good thing. If somebody could please send a note to the developers of most DAW's, various performers and accedemics who make me think of the word "critical theory" (regardless of the topic the paper is actually on)? Thanks ;¬).
* ChucK releases: it's been a while since the last release, so perhaps not many are holding their breath for the next release. It's coming, for better or for worse!! File IO is finally in place, along with several other features. miniAudicle MAUI for Windows and Linux are nearing completion as well. Stay tuned!
Sounds great! I'm very much looking forward to both of those. A million thanks again for everybody's time and efford. Full steam ahead! Yours, Kas.
Great work, you cHucKsterS! Just to add to the approaching new-years fun, now that the Max 5 SDK is out and I have a few semi-free moments, I should have a new chuck~ for max soon. I've got my rtcmix~ and maxlispj working for Max 5 now, and chuck~ uses a similar coding scheme. brad http://music.columbia.edu/~brad
Happy holidays Ge!
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Ge Wang
in Calgary continue to contribute code and ideas. Admittedly, incorporating contributions has been an issue, and this is squarely my fault for not having better coordinated due to cycle shortages. For what it's worth, I am just going to accept that the load not going to get any better and will endeavor to re-organize!
Personally I'm going to hopefully have some time to keep working on ideas for the VM. I've been playing around with the execution model a bit, with some ideas on how to deal with overall speed, optimization, and the 64-bitness problem. In terms of making it easier to contribute code, I'm planning on keeping patches organized for easy application to the ChucK CVS using a public git repo. Hopefully this will make it easier to review proposed features and apply them to the upstream CVS. This should enable continuing development of proposed patches without the need to wait for a CVS dev to apply it, taking some load off your end of things. Steve
participants (4)
-
Brad Garton -
Ge Wang -
Kassen -
Stephen Sinclair