Live Nightclub Hacking

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Posted by michael on Thursday September 2, 2004 @01:43AM from the knit-one-perl-two dept.

rjjm writes "Alex Mclean has written a stormin' article at perl.com on Hacking Perl In Nightclubs. Alex programmes live on stage to perform his music."

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Re:white boy by simcop2387 · 2004-09-02 01:56 · Score: 4, Informative

slashdot mangled this perl script, and the geek that i am, figured i'd make some music and fix it:)

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q *=2) +=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[ P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q]; sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print
There are better languages for this, like ChucK by Trepidity · 2004-09-02 02:01 · Score: 5, Informative

ChucK is a "concurrent, on-the-fly audio programming language", designed from the ground up precisely for this application: live programming of generative music.

--
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Re:Unbelievable by yaxu · 2004-09-02 02:13 · Score: 4, Informative

If I may comment as the author of the article... It's not that dangerous, to be honest. I make a change, then press ctrl-x, which re-interprets the code into a dummy 'package.' If that doesn't cause compile-time errors, then it interprets the code into the live 'package.' So all I have to worry about is run-time errors, which are pretty rare. As I'm generally running a lot of scripts at the same time, it doesn't matter if one of them drops out or goes mental. In fact, it usually sounds good. I just have to fix it, then break it again, then fix it again to make it sound intentional!
Re:Perl by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-02 02:23 · Score: 5, Informative

Incorrect.

cogsci.princeton.edu -
Program - a sequence of instructions that a computer can interpret and execute;

The text file itself is only a script. The script + interpreter is a full program (also worth nothing that several people have whipped up programs that allows you to compile Perl scripts in to native binaries)
Re:Alex performs live on stage to program his musi by andrew_0812 · 2004-09-02 02:43 · Score: 4, Informative

No, if you would bother to RTFA, you would see that he is has written a multi-threadded text editor for writing perl. One thread is the editor, the other thread runs the code constantly. He writes perl code to generate musical patters. He has a system set up so that he can have multiple programmers working at the same time and it will all be in sync, you can even change the temp and all programs will sync up.

I don't know about programming on stage, but the concept of synthesizing music in perl is quite interesting.
Alex has been doing this for years by babbage · 2004-09-02 03:25 · Score: 4, Informative
Alex McLean and Ade Ward have been performing live Perl music under the name Slub for several years now. Quoting from Alex's website:
Behind the scenes, slub is a fairly idealistic project. We make music using entirely self-written software. Every aspect of slub composition and synthesis comes from our fingers. Many interoperating pieces of software work together to generate the music live, using a handmade client/server protocol. The software sampler/synth is written in C (by Ade), the server and synch code is in Perl (by me) and a whole slew of composition scripts and apps are written in Perl and RealBasic. The whole system is distributed across Ade's powerbook and my debian Linux laptop (we stopped short of writing our own operating system).

Poke around and you can probably find MP3s of their music -- it's interesting stuff.

In addition, the two of them have written some papers & software on the programmatic generation of art, whether that be music, graphic arts, software itself, etc:
Much more of Ade's software is available from Signwave.co.uk.
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DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL