Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] What's up with SAOL?
From: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky ("M.)
Date: Tue Jan 22 2002 - 17:39:32 EET
On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Paul Winkler wrote:
> > I never posted the SAOL / SASL, although I suppose I could. Neither
> > is very interesting; the Perl script that generates the score is
> > much more interesting.
>
> I see what you mean. I like the texture, but it doesn't vary at all;
> all the action is in the somewhat conversational rhythm and in the
> change from one chord to the next.
If you were able to browse the PowerPoint presentation, you'd see that
just about all the decisions are made at random. It's essentially a
random walk in a space of chords using Harry Partch's Otonalities and
Utonalities. About the only thing that's pre-defined is the duration of
the piece, 5 minutes. The "rhythm" is simply random durations between a
lower and upper limit.
> In general, the SASL examples I've seen are dead boring. :) At first
> glance, I was surprised that SASL provides so little compared to
> csound's score language. But then I realized that I've never been very
> successful using the "features" of csound scores, I always end up
> using something else to generate raw note lists.
My impression is that most "sfront" and CSound users use MIDI rather
than the score language. Usually when someone hands me a SAOL
instrument, the first thing I have to do is hack the code so it uses
actual frequencies rather than MIDI note numbers. That, of course, is
necessary because I'm a microtonalist. I could do it with MIDI pitch
bends like many other microtonalists, but it makes the code harder to
read, and I'd need some off-line MIDI tools.
The score language is indeed primitive and is *intended* to be generated
by code rather than by people, as it was in "When Harry Met Iannis". I
don't see the point of encoding a bunch of numbers in MIDI only to have
to decode them again in the SAOL. Of course, if you're building
instruments to be played by a keyboard, wind or guitar synthesizer,
you'd need them to decode MIDI coming from the controller. That's not
what I do, though -- at least not yet. I have a Yamaha WX5/VL-70M pair
for that, and at some point would like to put a computer in the loop and
have it "justify" the pitches while generating accompaniment, but that's
some time away.
> > > - a community of people discussing how to write saol effectively,
> > > something like the csound list.
> >
> > It started out like that but sort of petered out.
>
> I wonder why so many people stick with csound?
When I first started down this road (computer music) after 18 years away
from it, SAOL / sfront were just starting out and CSound had been around
for at least 15 years. There are (almost) three generations of CSound
users -- Barry Vercoe, the people who learned from Barry, and the people
who learned from *them*. There are thousands of instruments and scores
to play them, probably thousands of composers who use CSound and so on.
A few composers like me working with sfront aren't going to overturn
that huge CSound market share, any more than Red Hat 7.2 is going to
replace Windows on corporate desktops.
When I got back into computer music, I picked SAOL because it looked
interesting, played around with the tools available and quickly
discovered that the only usable one was "sfront".
> I just spent the past couple hours looking through the sfront and jack
> documentation, andd have concluded that it will take someone who's
> really comfortable with C to write a jack driver for sfront. I think
> it should only take a day, or even a couple of hours, but for *me* it
> would probably take a week of blundering around clumsily, and I can't
> spare that much time. I think it would be a worthy project, though...
> it sure would be nice to be able to record realtime output from an
> saol instrument, or use them as a dsp system for ecasound or ardour.
OK ... what is JACK? Actually, "sfront" has PortAudio capabilities now,
so you should be able to connect it to real-time audio I/O. It's
probably a lot easier to do in Linux than Windows; it's easier to get
the OS out of the way in Linux. I'm still struggling with Delta 66
driver issues on my Linux box, so I've never done any real-time work on
it, but sooner or later ALSA will stabilize and have documentation (hey,
ALSA folks -- read my lips :) and I'll be able to do it.
-- M. Edward Boraskyznmeb_AT_borasky-research.net http://www.borasky-research.net/HarryIannis.htm
How to Stop A Folksinger Cold # 4 "Tie me kangaroo down, sport..." Tie your own kangaroo down -- and stop calling me "sport"!
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