[chuck-users] Wekinator

Rebecca Fiebrink fiebrink at Princeton.EDU
Fri Apr 8 11:53:52 EDT 2011


Hi Michael,

Thanks for the feedback. Can I request that we move this conversation (and anyone else who wants to talk about wekinator) to the wekinator users mailing list? That way other users can respond with their ideas (and possibly identify ways they might help address these issues).

Rebecca

On 2011-04-08, at 8:45 AM, Michael Heuer wrote:

> Rebecca Fiebrink wrote:
> 
>>> Every time Ge drops by this mailing list, it feels like a drive-by.
>>> 
>>> This is awesome!  Why haven't we heard about it before?  A lot of us
>>> are doing similar things (Monome, iPhone/iPad, Android,
>>> OpenKinect/OpenNI, game controllers <--> OSC <--> ChucK, Processing,
>>> mlrv, PD) and probably could have been helpful in its development.
>> 
>> Thanks for the shout-out, Ge, and for the interest, Michael.
>> 
>> In short, you haven't heard about Wekinator because I was nose-deep in dissertation work until quite recently. The Wekinator is software I built during my recent PhD at Princeton, and it's meant to enable composers and musicians to more easily use machine learning to create interactive systems. (Please see the website for more info: http://wekinator.cs.princeton.edu/)
>> 
>> The software is currently in a stable state, and it's usable by anyone who wants to control ChucK, Processing, Unity, Ableton, or pretty much anything else that can be controlled by a stream of OSC messages. These audio/video/etc. systems can be controlled by gesture (Kinect, Arduino, USB game controllers, webcam, ...), audio (e.g. using ChucK audio feature extractors, Max/MSP analyzer~, etc.), or anything else that can extract information about human actions in real-time and pass it to Wekinator via OSC.
>> 
>> The software will continue to evolve. There are some architectural changes which must happen soon, but if anyone is looking to help with development, there are a few areas where I see room for collaboration:
>> - UI (to keep this cross-platform, my plan is to stay in Java, using JavaFX + processing; that said, the UI needs an overhaul)
>> - Documentation (READMEs, FAQ, and in-app help)
>> - Examples (e.g., putting together a nice repository of code examples of ChucK, Max/MSP, Ableton, Processing, etc. being driven by Wekinator)
>> - Determining what is necessary for tighter integration into Max/MSP (e.g. using Jamoma framework), with working examples for our Max-loving friends
>> 
>> Additionally, I'm very interested in hearing suggestions, bug reports, and feature requests from people who are actively using Wekinator. From the beginning, the software has been driven by the ideas of people actually using it to make music, and it's become a much better project as a result.
>> 
>> Lastly, if this project interests you at all, please consider joining the Wekinator mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/wekinator-users?pli=1. That's the best forum to share your ideas, bugs, questions, etc.
> 
> Hello Rebecca,
> 
> I was able to spend an hour or so with Wekinator last night, and while
> I did get things up and running, I wasn't really able to make any
> music with it yet.  The setup/getting started doc might want to run
> completely through a single example that works on all platforms (with
> say mouse input), and give specifics about what motions to use when
> training and what the result musically should be (e.g. vertical
> movement of the mouse affected the pitch of the connected synth).
> 
> Second, it seems odd that writing synths in ChucK should involve copy
> and paste.  SynthClass is begging to be made a superclass that you
> extend from.
> 
> And as a Java UI guy, I would recommend staying away from JavaFX.
> Swing is fine for forms and button clicking configuration stuff, the
> current code (layouts specifically) just needs to be cleaned up some.
> 
> If I were using Wekinator for a performance, I would want it to be
> running in the background on the command line from a saved
> configuration, would that be possible?
> 
>   michael



More information about the chuck-users mailing list