ragalike, a request for feedback

[Renick Bell]

I've been learning Supercollider now for just under three months.
Thanks for Supercollider, SwingOSC, SCVIM, and David Cottle's book!
I've been having loads of fun.

Below are links to the code (and audio) for the largest thing I've
done, and I'd like to get feedback about it. I am most concerned about
the programming techniques employed in the piece. I strongly suspect
that the code could be more concise, but I don't yet have the
knowledge of how to achieve that efficiency; that's what I hope to
learn from you all. As for the aesthetics, well, this is primarily a
technical test for myself to be able to step through patterns and do
some other basic manipulations with a GUI.

The piece is called Ragalike. It's a kind-of-interactive algorithmic
composition of unfixed duration which is VERY loosely based on raga
performance conventions.

Please download the code and play with it:

http://the3rd2nd.com/ragalike/ragalike_supercollider_code.txt

It requires Supercollider 3 and SwingOSC. I'm using Linux, so I'm not
sure if Mac users can remove the "J"s from the GUI parts and run it.

If you would, also please answer as many of the following questions as
you can and send the feedback to me at renick(at)gmail.com.

- Are you able to run the code without errors? If you get errors, what are they?

- Are you able to produce sound by running this code?

- The program takes about 14 seconds to load on my Pentium M 1.7 with
the Linux 2.6.16-rt29 kernel. How long does it take to load on your
computer? What kind of system are you using?

- What suggestions do you have to reduce the length of time required
for the program to load?

- Do you see any mistakes or poor practices with regard to programming style?

- What suggestions do you have to make the code more concise?

- Given the limited elements employed, how could the expressiveness of
this interactive composition be improved?

- What could be done to the GUI to make the composition more usable?

- What other comments do you have?

Alternatively, you can just listen to mp3s or oggs performances of the
piece, which can be downloaded here (plus a screenshot):

http://the3rd2nd.com/ragalike/index.html

Feedback of any kind is appreciated.

Renick

[Dan Stowell]

Renick,

I like it a lot. Listened to the first MP3 (which gets a bit
overexcited towards the end, I thought) then downloaded the code.
Replaced "JSC" with "SC" and it ran perfectly on OSX (screenshot
attached).

It doesn't take any particularly perceptible time to load (certainly
less than a second) on my Mac PowerBook, although one thing I would
point out is to make sure that the SynthDefs are in a separate bracket
from all the other code - the SynthDefs will take typically about
0.6-1.0s to load to the server, so there needs to be some kind of gap
before using them in anything.

One small optimisation that may help: you have some large arrays of
data which I think are unchanging. For fixed arrays like that you can
put a hash sign in front - e.g. change
scale_raga = [0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10];
to
scale_raga = # [0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10];
which will make them literal arrays, handled in a more efficient
manner by the interpreter. I can't tell if that would speed things up
for you or not.

Best
Dan

Post by Renick Bell
I've been learning Supercollider now for just under three months.
Thanks for Supercollider, SwingOSC, SCVIM, and David Cottle's book!
I've been having loads of fun.
Below are links to the code (and audio) for the largest thing I've
done, and I'd like to get feedback about it. I am most concerned about
the programming techniques employed in the piece. I strongly suspect
that the code could be more concise, but I don't yet have the
knowledge of how to achieve that efficiency; that's what I hope to
learn from you all. As for the aesthetics, well, this is primarily a
technical test for myself to be able to step through patterns and do
some other basic manipulations with a GUI.
The piece is called Ragalike. It's a kind-of-interactive algorithmic
composition of unfixed duration which is VERY loosely based on raga
performance conventions.
http://the3rd2nd.com/ragalike/ragalike_supercollider_code.txt
It requires Supercollider 3 and SwingOSC. I'm using Linux, so I'm not
sure if Mac users can remove the "J"s from the GUI parts and run it.
If you would, also please answer as many of the following questions as
you can and send the feedback to me at renick(at)gmail.com.
- Are you able to run the code without errors? If you get errors, what are they?
- Are you able to produce sound by running this code?
- The program takes about 14 seconds to load on my Pentium M 1.7 with
the Linux 2.6.16-rt29 kernel. How long does it take to load on your
computer? What kind of system are you using?
- What suggestions do you have to reduce the length of time required
for the program to load?
- Do you see any mistakes or poor practices with regard to programming style?
- What suggestions do you have to make the code more concise?
- Given the limited elements employed, how could the expressiveness of
this interactive composition be improved?
- What could be done to the GUI to make the composition more usable?
- What other comments do you have?
Alternatively, you can just listen to mp3s or oggs performances of the
http://the3rd2nd.com/ragalike/index.html
Feedback of any kind is appreciated.
Renick
--
Renick Bell
http://www.the3rd2nd.com
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