Category Archives: the cosmos

everything that is && everything that isn’t

Milky Tracker

Posted on by
Milky Tracker

Back in mid-90’s, I was sysop of Digital Dissonance BBS, along with my co-sysops Eric of worshiptheglitch.com and Justin of JustinDay.com. They did most of the work. :)

Digital Dissonance was a community where musicians in the 209/559 area code would come and share music. And I don’t mean trading commercial tracks, but music they had composed or remixed themselves.

Minus a few midi tracks, the music was written almost exclusively with trackers. The tracker of choice being Triton‘s Fast Tracker II.

Via a twitter comment from Eric, I recently discovered Milky Tracker, a tracker that is heavily inspired by Fast Tracker II, if not a modern clone. Having spent a fair amount of time with it over the weekend, I can personally authenticate that Milky Tracker offers a genuine Fast Tracker II experience. While using it, I felt like I was back on my 386 in my high school bedroom.

I’ve kept most, if not all the mods from Digital Dissonance. At some point, I’ll have to put them up on the interwebs. Until then, here’s a track I wrote 13 years, called Clu.

ChucK => Audio Programming Language

Posted on by
ChucK => Audio Programming Language

Yesterday, I finally had the opportunity to check ChucK out. Early exit polls suggest that ChucK is awesome!!

What is ChucK?

ChucK is a new (and developing) audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and now, analysis – fully supported on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a new time-based, concurrent programming model that’s highly precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), as well as dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly.

If you are anything like me, then you’ll probably want to take a look at the code. Here’s a page full of examples. If two clicks is too many, you can jump straight to whirl.ck.

Perhaps there is a live coding performance in my future.

The Tar Spangled Banner Tour

Posted on by

Sauls Williams as Niggy Tardust in The Tar Spangled Banner Tour

MARCH
12 SXSW, Austin, TX [music]
13 SXSW, Austin, TX [music]
17 Plaza Club, Vancouver BC [music]
18 Aladdin, Portland, OR [music]
19 Neumo’s, Seattle WA [music]
21 Slims, San Francisco, CA [music]
22 Club Mercy, Santa Barbara, CA [music]
24 Casbah, San Diego, CA [music]
25 Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA [music]
26 Clubhouse, Tempe AZ [music]
27 Chandler Gilbert Community College, Phoenix AZ [spoken word]
28 Estrella Mountain Community College Phoenix AZ [spoken word]
29 Launchpad, Albuquerque, NM [music]
31 The Loft, Dallas TX [music]

APRIL
01 Warehouse Live Studio, Houston TX [music]
03 The Parish, New Orleans LA [music]
04 The Loft, Atlanta GA [music]
06 Ramshead, Annapolis MD [music]
07 930 Club, Washington DC [music]
08 Paradise, Boston MA [music]
09 Irving Plaza, NY NY [music]
11 Trocadero, Philadelphia PA [music]
12 Iron Horse, Northampton, MA [music]
13 La Tulipe, Montreal QC [music]
14 Mod Club, Toronto ONT [music]
16 Blind Pig, Ann Arbor MI [music]
17 Grog Shop, Cleveland OH [music]
18 Martyrs, Chicago IL [music]
19 Varsity Theatre, Minneapolis MN [music]
21 Fox Theatre, Boulder CO [music]
22 Belly Up, Aspen CO [music]
23 Kilby Court, Salt Lake City UT [music]

Just got these tour dates in my inbox. Though I’m attending SXSW, it looks like I’ll be leaving before his shows on the 12th and 13th. Hey Saul, any chance of adding Fresno, CA to the list?

SineBox

Posted on by

The Csound Blog
Issue #12

Today’s blog is on SineBox: a “music box” like instrument that plays itself. Once a user starts SineBox with a single i-event in the score, SineBox creates instances of itself, generating multiple sine tones over time. This may not be the most musical piece of Csound technology ever conceived of. It can, however, be molded to fit a wide range of uses, musical and otherwise.

Topics

  • P-Fields
  • if
  • schedule

More at The Csound Blog. For more information about Csound, please visit cSounds.com.