(duplicate of a post on sc-users)
Just wanted to share something I've been toying with, kind of a welcome to 2006 present perhaps. A short teaser, a sketch of a housey number I've been working on as an antidote for the winter blues. Every so often I get tired of making serious music and I just gotta have da funk.
http://www.dewdrop-world.net/audio/techno-link-demo.mp3 Apropos of recent mailing list discussions of code design--for quite some time I've wanted a way to link sequencing processes together, so that one can control the behavior of one or more others. Also I wanted the binding to be dynamic so I can make and break the links in real time (that part needs a bit more work). Here you're hearing a bassline driving a chordal process, so that the chords sound only when the filter envelope gets triggered. I can change the go/no-go condition any time along with other parameters that can modify the behavior of the child stream(s) on the fly.
For me, this is huge. With some more practice, I should be able to run streams of meta-events that control rapid-fire changes of texture, establish rhythmic relationships between layers, describe a slower-moving harmonic progression that other processes fill out in different ways, and probably even generate counterpoint algorithmically. (Yes, I will release the code structure ... eventually.)
The chords will probably not make it into the final piece--I borrowed them for testing purposes from another piece that's in a different key. To change the key, I only had to do this: Mode(\tech1) => BP(\clav2) -- done.
... the point being to back up Felix's point about design. Because I spent a good part of the past year working on a framework to help me manipulate streams and patterns, I was able to prototype this in a matter of days. Not that every piece needs that level of new code ... I guess what I'm trying to say is that by stumbling toward and eventually settling on a consistent working method (this framework is my third attempt), I'm now able to sketch out ideas very fast. Some of the drum patterns, for instance, I could sketch out in about 10 lines of code. And changing the key of the chords with one command was a special thrill.
That's my experience ... it really does work! But you have to be patient about it too--my first couple of interface designs were failures
... for me it was part of the process of discovering what my requirements were.
hjh
