Summary on Projects

Today’s great success concluded with the KIns Player automatically recording a loop for playback. Julia is still tinkering with playing a loop while recording another instrument. However, the toggle function on the Recording Loop button is working. The KIns (Keyboard Instrument) is fully functional with GUI on a Mac. However, it is not functional on Windows. With miniAudicle installed, the KIns is easy to install and use for simple play of the provided instruments. Future development includes keeping an eye out for the cross-platform Qt being developed by miniAudicle’s author S. Salazar. Also, developing the ability to play a loop while recording a new loop remains on the wish list. Additional instruments, additional slider bars using MAUI Elements to enable even more live synthesis, and the development of scores. The Rainfall Player works for users with Processing and Chuck installed. The installation is a bit more involved. The player works with any adc, installed or external mics. Future development includes packaging for a single download, adding different schemes, i..e. background images and objects to rain something other than cats and dogs or shhhhh! We discussed the overall learning process and came to unanimous agreement that the tools we used supported deeper learning of the principles. Our approaches varied in the early weeks, but in retrospect, we felt a guided tour through the material should weave the tool features with in depth explanation together. For instance, very early on we read about sound and how sinusoidal waves combine to make more complex sounds. We feel that as part of this discussion an introduction to how to make a simple SinOsc in ChucK would be appropriate and helpful. Also, we agreed that a visual such as offered in TAPESTREA to see how the wave generated appears helps in the understanding of this fundamental concept. By combining the building blocks of signal processing, synthesis and programming, we felt a stronger foundation of understanding can be achieved. Simple sine waves, frequencies, classes, objects, variables and parameters first. Then complex waves, unit generators and envelopes, using another layer of programming that gives the students more control and an understanding of these basics will give them greater success in creating sounds they envision rather than random experimentation. Once they have built up a small library of files, then introduce functions where they can take blocks of code they have created and learn how to reuse it and change parameters. This would be a good time to introduce more complex timing and synchronization methods, sporking several files and possibly using event driven options. Filters made more sense to us when we also saw a visual display of how envelopes change sound. The Circle audio software gave a good overview of ADSR filters, envelopes, and how various other filters operate on sound. The examples folder of Chuck, MiniAudicle and TAPESTREA provides a great resource for simple introduction to become familiar with how code is laid out, and it is very easy to simply change values to learn how it affects sound, and to discover and work with simple debugging errors. TAPESTREA is an interesting program to work with to create a “musical tapestry” of pre-recorded sounds. It is experimental software and there are several known and unknown bugs, so for a beginner it may yield somewhat frustrating to work with on any significant level. But using it for a clear purpose like separating the frequencies of a pre-recorded wave file, or having a mix of prerecorded sounds and ChucK scripts, it would make it very easy to create a soundscape and record to a file.