All week I've been on a PureData course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, with Simon Kilshaw. PureData, or Pd, is a free and open source graphical programming language for music and video; in plain language, a system allows one to plug together a series of graphical objects on a screen in order to create an original work of digital art.

Pd is closely allied with another very similar language, Max/MSP, both having in fact been initiated by the same programmer, Miller Puckette. I've been working with and teaching a Max/MSP course for several years now; so why study Pd? Max/MSP is in many ways a much slicker and more fully developed environment, significantly easier to use, with clear documentation and tutorials, many higher level objects built in, and a large community of users. By contrast, coming to Pd from Max feels like a step back in time; the user interface seems clunky, many basic objects seem to be missing, the documentation is by comparison chaotic, and overall it feels like a poor relation.

Well, poor; yes exactly! You would be if you had to buy Max/MSP at the full commercial going rate of $699, and the 'price point' of Pd is undoubtably a serious attraction. More importantly, perhaps, the open source nature of Pd creates a different kind of community, one where it is perhaps easier for creative artists to own and share their digital works without being encumbered by licencing considerations.

The course here has been quite a full-on experience. Simon and his students at RWCMD seem to have a programming style which is extremely fast and hacky, driving straight at getting musical results from the software without much concern for neatness or elegance. It works; most of the week we've been following along behind Simon click-by-click as he more or less improvised patches before our eyes. Graphical languages are great for this kind of very rapid prototyping and developing of ideas, although I found that for my style of working I liked to go a little bit slower and think through what I was doing a little more.

Over the last two days we've also seen some of the work of one of the graduates here, Tristan Evans, including a very impressive piece for piano and Pd called 'Takeover'. Tomorrow, we're scheduled to put together a collaborative performance using a rather remarkable internet-based version of Pd, netpd; if all goes according to plan you should be able to watch and hear us all performing live using this url at 1500 GMT+1 (that's three o'clock UK time).

I'll (maybe) be performing on the patch above. For those who are interested, this uses nothing which is not in Pd-extended (I hope!). The guts of the sound are four Karplus-Strong 'pluck' synths, with the delay lengths changing at random to produce glissando effects. These gestures are fed into an instance of freeverb, where the reverb tail can be frozen; while the tail is frozen, a pitch shifter patch is used to move this sound around in interesting ways. The klang gestures are either triggered manually, or by a randomised metronome, which can be set to the rather ridiculous value of 25 ms to produce an insane cascade of stringy sounds.

Update 2024​

Confusing reference to 'the patch' above? What patch? Presumably a puredata patch: not sure if have that any more!

Well, it's a start; learning the basics of GEM in Pd. And, whoever would have thought that the quicktime midi synth on the mac had that 'Punch' sound hidden in one of it's alternate banks :)

Keeping jazz where it belongs - in the closet :)

I'm working on a new piece towards ARTMUSFAIR/2009, for flute, horn, cello, marimba and 'tape'; this is me working towards the latter, the fixed audio part of the piece. Up to my usual text-to-screech tricks here; this shows some of the tools and methods I use to put things like this together.

This years Plug 2009 festival of new music at the RSAMD starts soon, 27 April - 1 May. One of the features this year is a new set of 'Glasgow' sequenzas, written variously by students and staff and interspersed among larger programme items. Mine is for trombone and, between myself and Head of Composition Gordon McPherson, we've cooked up a plan to, um, kill a trombonist? Here's my description from the score;

'Over the course of an extended period of time (30-60 minutes) the trombonist is asked to play a 'virtuosic' passage in alternation with vigorous bouts of physical exercise. The piece becomes harder to execute as it progresses; not through any development in the music, but through the physical deterioration of the player. At intervals during the performance we hear a tireless computer rendition of the piece as it 'ought' to be.'

So we've got Davur Magnussen, the brilliant new young principal trombone of the RSNO running on a treadmill over the course of an hour, whilst attempting to play 'virtuosic' material of one sort or another in competition with the computer. Should be fun! (Well, not so much fun for Davur, perhaps :)

Draft version of the score available as pdf.

I'm quite excited today to discover a free/open-source music notation program I hadn't previously heard of, MuseScore. (That I hadn't heard of it probably has something to do with the fact that they've only just released a mac binary.) Very early days so far, but already I'm very excited to see the beginnings of what could be a foss alternative to Sibelius and Finale, something which I think the world badly needs. I had a play with it; it's ok, got used to the note entry and editing interface quite quickly, kind of like a cross between Sib and Fin in the way it works. Didn't take long to notate the gamelan tune I heard in my dream this morning, although I could have done with a custom key signature;

I was able to export it as a midi file, which had some small problems, and also as .xml which, again after a bit of hacking I was able to open very nicely in Sibelius. Now, if I was dead pure rich and that, I'd give these guys a bunch of money to really develop this!

https://flic.kr/p/65rB8N

(Pics by Tamara Polajnar)

Nice piece on 'Bare Wires' by Clare Sinclair in the Skinny;

'The lines between technology and the arts are blurring at an astronomical pace: the latest laptops and computers position themselves not only as tools for business, but as home entertainment centres where anything seems possible.

J. Simon van der Walt, performing as part of the Cryptic Nights season, parallels this revolution yet takes it back to the 'Bare Wires'. As Edward 'Teddy' Edwards and the Electr-O-Chromatic orchestra, he presents and electronic symphony of music and performance.

Van der Walt's imagination takes us on a technologically devised musical jourrney with improvisation, composition and electro-junk. His passion as a performer, actor, director and composer is apparent, and he strives to blend musicality, innovation and theatricality into one.

Luckily, Cryptic's creative drive lies in a similar field, making the Cryptic Nights season a perfect match for the composer. He arrestingly combines his "creative misuse of technology", such as text-to-screech (the warping of standard computer text-to-speech software), with reverting back to his childhood use of electronic junk as instruments. This piece could reinvent the way we experience music, and its place in a modern society. The electronic age is vibrantly creative, and with 'Bare Wires' the performing arts are keeping pace.'

Got hold of a loan of a very cool instrument to use in the show;

Yup, it's a cynthcart, a Commodore 64 hacked up to play as a synth! Tried it out in rehearsal today, works great. (Thanks to Col for the loan.)

Well, that worked out easily enough. If the longer numbers are in the region of five mins, I reckon I can just about bring that in at 45 mins.

Also working on a list of instruments, looks like twenty-two different bits of gear, including laptops, effects units and conventional instruments.