[CM] slippery chicken release

Fri May 25 03:36:51 PDT 2012

Hi István,

> Well, from what I can gather slippery chicken uses a 2.6 version of

That's right.

> Common Music. Great piece of software, by the way :)

Thanks.  It's a monster.  Hope it's going to be useful to some people here.

> What I would be interested in knowing is why you chose this older
> version instead of Common Music 3. Was it because you started working

Because afaik CM3 is now no longer in Common Lisp but in Scheme.

> on slippery chicken before 3.0 came out, or was it because you

That's true too.

> preferred to work in Common Lisp instead of Scheme. Or did 3.0 bring
> in some changes that didn't play well with the design of slippery
> chicken?

It really just was a language thing.  Having worked on SC in CLOS
since 2000 it wouldn't be a simple thing to port it.  I haven't looked
into CLOS->Scheme in any detail but when I did a while ago it didn't
seem trivial.  Rick did it though (and Bill too from Common Lisp at
least, I assume) so I'd be interested in the process. Certainly the
embedding potential of Scheme is very attractive.

> I am asking because I am planning on working on a music and sound
> editor/composition environment for my graduation thesis next year, and
> am thinking of using Common Music as a component.

Well the thing to bear in mind is that I don't see CM and SC as being
the same beast at all.  AFAIK CM is now really aimed at real-time algo
comp whereas SC is very much not real-time and is focussed on
generating complete pieces in quite a specific way.  I'm very curious
to find out if that particular way is too restrictive for other
composers or not.

Cheers, Michael

>
> Good day,
> István Lakatos
>
> On 25 May 2012 12:48, Torsten Anders <torsten.anders at beds.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Dear Michael,
>>
>> Great news! (And great to see that you go quite some AHRC grant for that recently.)
>>
>> Just a question: you say that this software is written in Common Lisp, and in the credits you say that Common Music is packaged with it. Does that mean you are using some older version of Common Music?
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Torsten
>>
>> --
>> Dr Torsten Anders
>> Course Leader, Music Technology
>> University of Bedfordshire
>> Park Square, Room A315
>> http://www.torsten-anders.de
>>
>>
>> PS: Also, you are saying clearly that you do not plan an graphical user interface for this software. Nevertheless, likely it would be relatively easy to turn your whole software into a library for PWGL or OpenMusic. If you still have some resources left from your AHRC grant then doing so could greatly strengthen your impact (good for your REF and may even be helpful for the next grant application). It is easy, because every Lisp function such as make-slippery-chicken can be immediately used as a GUI object (box) in a PWGL or OpenMusic patch. If you want, you can further customise the graphical interface of central functions (e.g., have a menu to define a certain function argument). Such customisation can be available (to a certain extent) for both PWGL and OpenMusic at the same time when using OMPW (https://github.com/kisp/ompw).
>>
>> The advantage for yourself could be that you get graphical editors such as a BPF editor (basically an envelope editor, could be useful, e.g., for your pitch curves), and -- perhaps more importantly -- music notation editors (e.g., check out the ENP editor of PWGL). Score snippets can be arranged in time using OpenMusic's maquette etc.  You may also want to use existing PWGL or OpenMusic libraries together with your own work.
>>
>> For a more advanced used of such features you would need to have a conversation of your music representation (your slippery chicken object) into the OpenMusic / PWGL music representation. You already did something similar when defining your Lilypond interface (likely you are using Fomus, which makes this interface much more simple to define), so you know that such score format conversation is not defined on a single day, but is not too complex either.
>>
>> Anyway, you are probably still not interested :)
>>
>> On 24 May 2012, at 19:04, Michael Edwards wrote:
>>> It is with great pleasure that I announce the open-source release of my
>>> algorithmic composition software "slippery chicken":
>>> http://www.michael-edwards.org/sc/
>>>
>>> Please feel free to re-post to any potentially interested colleagues, students
>>> or mailing lists.
>>>
>>> Workshops introducing the software will be held in Edinburgh, UK, and
>>> Karlsruhe, Germany, in July 2012:
>>> http://www.michael-edwards.org/sc/workshops.html
>>>
>>> "slippery chicken" is an open-source algorithmic composition system written in
>>> Common Lisp which enables a top-down approach to music composition. The
>>> software was originally tailor-made to encapsulate the author's personal
>>> composition techniques, however many general-purpose algorithmic composition
>>> tools have been programmed that should be useful to a range of composers. The
>>> main goal of the project is to facilitate a melding of electronic and
>>> instrumental sound worlds, not just at the sonic but also at the structural
>>> level. Pure instrumental or electronic composition is of course possible with
>>> the system too. Techniques for the innovative combination of rhythm and pitch
>>> data--arguably one of the most difficult aspects of making convincing musical
>>> algorithms--are offered.
>>>
>>> Anyone interested in discussing the software is encouraged to join the Google
>>> Group http://groups.google.com/group/slippery-chicken
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>>
>>>        Michael Edwards
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ___________________________________________
>>>
>>> michael edwards
>>>
>>> office : (+44) (0)131 650 2431
>>> mobile : (+44) (0)7952 153750
>>>
>>> michael.edwards at ed.ac.uk
>>>
>>> MSc in Digital Composition and Performance
>>>     http://michael-edwards.org/dcp
>>> University of Edinburgh
>>>     http://michael-edwards.org/uofe
>>> Personal homepage
>>>     http://www.michael-edwards.org
>>> ___________________________________________
>>
>>
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