(Michael Chinen)

Lstn is another project I’ve been working on with Institute for Algorhythmics.
It is a program that sonifies real-time debugging data of other programs. If you were interested in the FuckingAudacity or FuckingWebBrowser demos you’ll probably like this one. Those were sonification from the inside out, and lstn is about external sonification:

We sonify opcodes, callstack, and active memory. The sonification of active memory is direct, but sonifying opcodes and callstack info is more tricky to do ‘mostly honestly,’ and we’re still trying to figure it out. The project is still in alpha stage.
You can use lstn to attach to pretty much any program on the mac besides itself.

You can also use lstn to do old-school sonification of chunks of memory (as opposed to jumping around wherever the opcodes go.) The sonification of memory this way has a suprising amount of periodicity in it, creating both tones, and even things like crecendi and decrecendi.

There is built in osc support, but we’re not sure yet what data to send, as my impression is that osc might choke if you send too much stuff at irregular intervals.

I’m hoping to work more on the display to draw a visual map of the memory and program counter and also some tree-like structure for visualizing the callstack.

Another feature to note is the speed control which reduces the speed of the program being attached to. This is important because our ears won’t be able to catch things that happen at rates higher than the sample rate. I hope as the sonification methods become more meaningful that this feature will have more value.

This project started last February, but has only gotten this far because I keep changing OS’s and computers. The program needs different source for each of these combinations, since the opcodes and opcode format for i386, i386_64 and ppc are different. As of right now it works on ppc best and i386 (core duo) pretty well. on ppc you can simultaneously attach to many different processes, but I haven’t gotten that to work on core duo yet.

This project has taught me a lot more about cpu internals and program structure than any other program, (or class for that matter) has given me. So if you’re a programmer and this kind of stuff tickles your whatever, I suggest taking a look at the source and asking me about it. Otherwise just hold on till we get a real release.

The MAX(a,b) macro bug I posted last was something I had done before. Today and Yesterday I spent a good few hours running over my old mistakes. What’s a difference between: unsigned char *dynArray = malloc(500); unsigned char trueArray[500]; well, Today’s arrrrrrg is that sizeof (dynArray) is just the size of a pointer, not the […]

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Over the last year in Berlin I worked on five collaborative music/performance/art projects that I’ve been meaning to post.

In the summer as a part of 48 Stunden Neukölln I did a collaboration with Tatsumi Ryusui (myspace).

Normally Tatsumi does experimental electronics improvisation and I do computer music or sonification stuff, but we were asked to play something a bit more poppy.

Tatsumi keeps everything real and is always exhibiting the utmost level of radness so I couldn’t pass this opportunity up. (After all, computer musicians secretly or publicly don’t like computer music and are always longing to find some pop outlet side-project to get some console for their self-imposed complexes.) Just kidding. I actually heard someone make this accusation for the general case. I must be still upset to post it here.

Tatsumi in white cow, me in aloha attire (it was friday):

Untitled from Tatsumi Ryusui on Vimeo.

Tatsumi played guitar and sung kayoukyoku, which is kind of between japanese folk and pop.
I made a effects processing program that has the interface inspired by emacs and Starcraft II.

You shouldn’t be freaking out. Starcraft II is a totally legit model for user interface. In general games are to interface as porn was to internet (although I can’t vouch for the correct SAT answer). As a competitive game it requires players to command with accuracy and dexterity while processing a huge amount of input. it is perhaps the most demanding in terms of user actions per minute (clicks, keystrokes). And it is essentially a performance environment, which is why some of the most popular channels are about watching shoutcasts of Starcraft II like Day9, HuskyStarcraft, and HDStarcraft. And not to mention it has a great community that amazingly includes genuinely cool genuinely interested genuinely cute girls like Press Heart To Continue. Yes, my love for starcraft is probably subject to second-hand embarassment. I’m not ashamed, so please learn to deal with it yourself or get in.

In using (text) programming as a medium for composition I often feel the need to be able to incorporate envelopes to control parameters such as volume/etc. This kind of thing the mouse is great for, and we’re pretty good at using it. It is of course imperfect for ‘drawing’ and I suck at ‘drawing’ and drawing to begin with (just how MouseX.kr and MouseY.kr in supercollider often brings snickers), but if processed correctly has many advantages for providing this need. No one’s saying you have to do a direct motion to parameter mapping. Also, we are all super fucking good at using the mouse now. If you have practiced an instrument and somehow got decent at it, you know how much time it takes. Chances are you spent a comparable amount of time using a mouse. Yet it’s somehow odd to think of it as practice.

Emacs is also great for its key input to do what you want as fast as possible. In general for commands you don’t touch the mouse and just press a combo of keys to execute commands.

The program I made was essentially a large effects box that allowed effect like delay/distortion/phaser/downsampling, mixing, zooming in on buffers, and quick parameter to mouse mapping based on keys/mouse position.
It looked like this:

It was done with OpenFrameworks, a minimal cross-platform C++ framework which I’ve been using in some Institute for Algorhythmics projects.

We’re going to play again on November 14 at Schlessiches Tor. I’ll post an update and info about other projects soon.

Knowing how to macro correctly is important in both the real world (starcraft) and when writing code. in c you can define useful macros like #define FFMAX(a,b) ((a) > (b) ? (a) : (b)) . The macros will be a little better than using even static inline functions because no extra memory is allocated for […]

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If you’re building a cocoa app, don’t use pthread mutexes and pthread threads. Use NSThread and NSLock. I’ve written a few cocoa apps that use pthreads, but maybe I’ve just been lucky till now.

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