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tunes

(a longer excerpt with different statistics)

A few years ago, I was fascinated by playing virtual memory swap files as audio. I wrote an algorithm to synthesize/simulate the way data structures are layed out in memory with some control over it. This is an excerpt of that process (the algorithm runs forever).

Data Anomalies 12a

... demo sent to Peter "Pita" Rehberg in Vienna ca. 1998 for release consideration ...

Hrvåtski "Mego Demo" (1998) • Untitled (3)

Hrvåtski "Mego Demo" (1998) • Untitled (5)

... phase-aligned stereo mix-down of the un-edited ROOM (ZOOM H1, pointed at the CROWD from the stage ; flipped 180º in software) & DIRECT (ZOOM H4 via stereo DI box "THRU" jacks) feeds of my (INEBRIATED) solo hybrid digital-analogue modular synthesizer (VOIGHT-KAMPFF MACHINE) set at williamsburg's 285 kent venue, may 11th, 2012 ; only the second (domestic) performance of the 3.0 "occlusion" rev. special thanks to pete swanson, forma (mark dwinell, george bennett, sophie lam), jon "porkchop" nicholson, eyebodega ... as well as bryan kasenic, rob lowe, scott goodwin, scott davis, and everyone at 285 kent ... 

... my absolute favorite moment of any given set of this music is when the crowd suddenly realizes the "live music" has in fact commenced & begins to actually focus on the sounds heard as "performance" instead of "background music" ... this sudden shift, from one second to the next, seems to sweep across the room in a single stage until everyone present suddenly begins questioning their behavior the second before (it happens right around 4:08 of this recording) ... i usually use this as a signal to begin the second section of the piece (speed increase, introduction of audio-rate FM to both digital voices) & build linearly from there ...

120511.285.kent

... both halves of the first DJ mix assembled in the Reckankomplex MathLab ca. 1998. A combination of short beat-matched segments, slight computer processing & assembly. Something of a time capsule of late-90's "virtuoso" dance music styles. In the spirit of transparency, the track-listing has been installed as a series of time-based comments. Downloading has been enabled ; Happy summer everyone. 

Hekla's Selection (1)

0 27 to @ 40 \i n [ 
	3 1.1 i ^ * = lf lf lfnoise3 (.08 .16 xrand urand sinosc 0 4 bilin) * i (.08 .16 xrand urand sinosc .3 2 bilin) * n + + nnhz urand sinosc 7 ^ 0 |
	lf lfnoise3 .75 * .25 + 0 | * 0 (.05 .2 xrand urand lfsaw) rot2 .95 i ^ * = a
	i 1.2 * 2X mum a 4 fadein $$
] ! +/ aa 4c 3 apverb6 3c 1 apverb6 (.0374 urand sinosc .9 *) fade2 .1 * 170 10 fadeout conormalize .85 * 0 >sfo

Sapf - 2019 - 0309 - 225408 - 0003

This account contains examples from a programming language for audio.
This language is still very experimental and is not available. 

WHAT

This programming language is called:

"A tool for the expression of sound as pure form."

It is an interpreter for a language for creating and transforming sound. The
language is mostly functional, stack based and uses postfix notation similar to
FORTH. It represents audio and control events using lazy, possibly infinite
sequences. It intends to do for lazy sequences what APL does for arrays: provide
very high level functions with pervasive automatic mapping, scanning, and
reduction operators. This makes for a language where short programs can achieve
results out of proportion to their size. Because nearly all of the programmer
accessible data types are immutable, the language can easily run multiple
threads without deadlock or corruption.

WHY

Other languages that inspired this one:
    APL, Joy[1], Haskell, Piccola[2], Nyquist[3], SuperCollider[4].

APL and FORTH (from which Joy derives) are both widely derided for being
write-only languages. Nevertheless, there has yet to be a language of such
concise expressive power as APL or its descendants. APL is powerful not because
of its bizarre symbols or syntax, but due to the way it automatically maps
operations over arrays and allows iterations at depth within arrays. This means
one almost never needs to write a loop or think about operations one-at-a-time.
Instead one can think about operations on whole structures.

Here is a great quote from Alan Perlis[5] on APL, which that also reflects my
interest in this way of programming :
"What attracted me, then, to APL was a feeling that perhaps through APL one
might begin to acquire some of the dimensions in programming that we revere in
natural language — some of the pleasures of composition; of saying things
elegantly; of being brief, poetic, artistic, that makes our natural languages
so precious to us."

The Joy language introduced concatenative functional programming. This generally
means a stack based virtual machine, and a program consisting of words which are
functions taking an input stack and returning an output stack. The natural
syntax that results is postfix. Over a very long time I have come to feel that
syntax gets in between me and the power in a language. Postfix is the least
syntax possible.

There are several reasons I like the concatenative style of programming:
    Function composition is concatenation. 
    Pipelining values through functions to get new values is the most natural
        idiom.
    Functions are applied from left to right instead of inside out. 
    Support for multiple return values comes for free. 
    No need for operator precedence. 
    Fewer delimiters are required: 
        Parentheses are not needed to control operator precedence.
        Semicolons are not needed to separate statements.
        Commas are not needed to separate arguments.


When I am programming interactively, I most often find myself in the situation
where I have a value and I want to transform it to something else. The thing to
do is apply a function with some parameters. With concatenative programming this
is very natural. You string along several words and get a new value.


REFERENCES    

1. http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/joy.html

2. http://scg.unibe.ch/research/piccola

3. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/nyquist/

4. http://supercollider.sourceforge.net

5. http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm
