Two days until I leave for Rome! I've been at the Supercollider 2012 Symposium all weekend, trying to glean interesting information for my dissertation and attending workshops. Supercollider is a program (and programming language) for audio synthesis among other things. I struggled a bit with some of the workshops, since I don't actually know the language, but for the most part I had a lot of fun kicking around in the computer music world. Before I go into any of the details, here are some photos that I should have put up with the last blog post!
The Easter Bunny Cake:
The eggs that we decorated by melting crayons!
A photo of us post-rollercoaster. Triumphant! You should have seen our faces while we were on the ride though: we were terrified!
The rhubarb-berry pie that I made! I know that it's not particularly relevant to this blog (and will just fuel more jokes about my obsession with food), but isn't it pretty?
Anyway, most of the symposium so far has been at Goldsmith's, another of the University of London branches. It is fairly far south, so I have to take a train to get there, although it takes no longer to get to campus than it does to get most places in London, to be honest. The best workshop I went to was led by a pretty famous live-coder who has written his own "language" to stack on top of Supercollider. I embedded a video below of some messing around that I tried to do with the language after the workshop.
I also went to a live coding concert last night, which was really interesting. I've seen a laptop ensemble before a few years ago, but last night presented a very broad range of styles and languages / methods. I had brought a friend from the dorm with me, and while he really liked the first set, he had to leave during the second because he couldn't take it anymore! To be honest, I was having trouble listening to it as well, because it sounded like ten tornado sirens all going at once. The third act was pretty hard to consider from a subjective, musical stance as well, because I was thinking the whole time about how much I wished I'd brought my earplugs. But the fourth set was by a laptop quartet who did a very nice job of working together to present a couple different musical ideas, from ambient to more club, driving beat. If I ever give live coding a try for real, I would like to go for their type of style. I can give you names if you would like to look up any of the artists and give them a listen, but I'm trying to keep it brief for the sake of the padres and grandma. : )
So here is a video that I made while I was messing around with learning a live coding language. The language is called Ixi Lang, and it is very nice because the synths and effects are prebuilt, so all you have to do is call them up and execute them. For a beginner like me, it's just really fun to make cool noises with a couple keystrokes. See if you can recognize the theme that I'm riffing off of after it gets going! haha
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