[chuck-users] instrument design considerations

[Atte André Jensen]

Hi

I'm wrestling with some mostly conceptual problems that I'd like to get 
some feedback on. I hope some of you people take the time to discuss 
this with me. It's not about chuck bugs, it's not about 
how-do-i-use-this-chuck-construct, it's about how I get my brain dead 
brain around a design problem for something that I really would like to 
do in chuck.

Long story short: I'd like to be able to record sniplets of midi into 
chuck and grow it (by performing various transformations). For this to 
work my instruments need to work with noteon/noteoff, since that's what 
gonna happen with midiin.

Currently I have a really simple, well working way of doing instruments 
by making each instrument a static member function of an Instruments 
class. Each function (might) take a length parameter indicating how long 
the instrument should sound before going into it's release phase.

 From a coding point of view I prefer my current instrument definition, 
but if it should work with midi I need to make instruments work with 
noteon/off. I'd like to be able to use the same instrument from both 
code and midi. Another issue with midi is that it should be polyphonic.

First question: How are you guys handling this? Anyone recorded midi 
sniplets into chuck for processing?

Attached is an (bit messy) attempt at this design. It's suffering from 
the CPU-eating problem that Ge advised about a couple of days ago 
(could/should be fixed, don't care at this point). There's currently 
also no support for "length-driven" use, but that would be easy, simply 
by having a play function that calls noteOn(), waits a few::ms and calls 
noteOff(). The reason for the four classes (monoInstrument, 
polyInstrument, mono_sine and poly_sine) is that I'd like to have as 
much of the book keeping as possible in the super classes, so basically 
only noise making is happening in sub classes. Actually I'd like to only 
have to write the mono_sine (or similar for other instruments) class.

Second question: Would it be possible to get rid of poly_sine, or at 
least the repetitive (for other instruments) code in functions on(), 
off() and kill()? Main reason it's there is that the voices are not 
known in any of the other classes. Could that be changed?

Supposed I actually get this thing going, I'm gonna set chuck to record 
to some data structure, probably an object. This is happening in one 
shred. But then I'd like to a) grow (permutate) and b) use this data 
structure in other shreds.

Third question: But how is that gonna be possible? The recorded-to 
instance is not known outside the scope of the recording shred :-( 
Static class? Possible, but inelegant.

Sorry for the loong post.

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

-- 
peace, love & harmony
Atte

http://www.atte.dk      | quartet:      http://www.anagrammer.dk
http://www.atte.dk/gps  | compositions: http://www.atte.dk/compositions
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