Re: Back on the original topic: SuperCollider

[<bsgood@adelphia.net>]

---- Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill <rs@moinlabs.de> wrote: 
> Ahemm...not wanting to sound like a pain in the ass here, but...that 
>original link in the "SuperCollider" mail was to a piece of software, 
>which I quickly installed on my machine yesterday...what does it do? What 
>good is it for me? What good is it for you (i.e. the guy who originally 
>posted the link)?

                 Rainer

I haven't used Supercollider a great deal myself, but I did a gig a few 
years ago with Tim Walters, who is a SC wizard. I fed some free-improv 
soprano sax playing to his laptop, which was running a collection of SC 
code he wrote. Great fun, because I had absolutely no idea what was going 
to come back at me. Tim had a whole bunch of signal processing 
routines--delays, loopers, pitch shifters, all kinds of 
distortions--triggered and controlled in real time, so the output was very 
much a collaborative effort.

SC itself is a programming language, qualitatively similar to MAX/MSP or 
Csound. You write code, compile it, and run it. Given all the creative 
work being done on software synthesizers (and software and hardware 
loopers) these days, it's probably not for everybody, but if you feel 
constrained by what's available, it's certainly worth a look.

Brian