Composer of Electronic and Chamber Music, Freelance Programmer

Just posted a video from a concert I did last year w/ Chris Burns. It’s live-coding (an improvised performance practice, in which performers program their instruments in concert), using Pure Data. This is the first set, using Vanilla PD. There’s a second set, using the NRCI networking library – don’t know if that one still exists…

Christopher Burns and Greg Surges Live Coding – 12.11.2008 from Greg Surges on Vimeo.

This document will (hopefully) serve as an easy to read and understand introduction to the process of writing an external for Pure Data. Pure Data, or PD, is a visual programming environment designed for real-time computer music applications. PD is open-source software, under the BSD license, and expansion of the software in the form of externals is strongly encouraged.

PD and its externals are written in the C programming language. When PD is running an external, it makes no distinction between the ‘core’ functionality and the external code. There are hundreds of user-written externals freely available for use and study. As you learn to write externals yourself, I strongly encourage studying other people’s code. For example, I learned about timing issues from studying the “pipe” object.

To get started coding an external, you’ll need a text editor. I use Textwrangler, but there are a few good, free editors out there. Get one with syntax highlighting. You’ll also need to install GCC, the Gnu C Compiler, and Make. If you’re on OS X, you can just install Apple’s XCode Developer Tools, and you’ll have both of these programs installed. I’m going to assume some knowledge of using the command line here, so I won’t explain how to use GCC or run Make. (Hint: type “make”.) You’ll also need an installation of PD, so that you can link and run your externals.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the basic concepts and chunks of code that you’ll need to write your external.

Every time I tell someone I’ve got a show with MiLO coming up, I seem to get questions:

“What’s a laptop orchestra?”

“Laptop? So… what do you actually play?”

“What does it sound like?”

(First, here’s a recording of MiLO from 12.07.2007.)

I’ve also been in touch with people from other laptop groups around the world, and the ensemble continues to become more popular. I’m not sure which was first, but PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra) and SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra) are certainly the most visible. These groups seem are getting generous funding and support from somewhere, and in return are offering the laptop orchestra as a pedagogical tool. Students at Princeton can take “PLOrk Seminar“, which seems to be a performance-based laptop orchestra course. You’ll notice that participating students must be using a Macbook, and must use a specific configuration, including MIDI interface and spherical speaker(?). Their professor/leader often serves as conductor, and there seems to be a definite professor – student relationship in the group.

In contrast, MiLO is described as:

…a new improvisation collective that fuses live electronic sound, instrumental performance, and video projection into a rich multimedia experience. The group embraces a wide variety of electronic practices: circuit-bending, software synthesis, repurposed effects pedals and portable game devices, live processing of instrumental sound, VJing, and procedural animation all find their way into the mix. Expect a rich, immersive tapestry of sound and image, all created live and in the moment.

We’re far more unstructured than other groups, receiving no funding and having no official academic presence. The group originally came out of some informal electronic jam sessions at the Kenilworth studios in Milwaukee, and much of that informality has remained. Although we do some pre-composed works now, improvisation is still a major part of what we do. Most of the people who play in the group are also instrument-builders/coders of some sort, and everyone has their own approach. There isn’t a standard MiLO piece of software or hardware, and I think that makes it interesting. I’d like to see more of this kind of openness and experimentation in laptop groups, and less classroominess – the ensemble has a lot of potential that needs to be explored, and I think that the rock band method will work the best. I’d be curious to hear from other laptop orchestra members, and learn their take on the best way to organize a group like this.

You know, since making the switch to Max/MSP from Pure Data, I’ve been quite pleased with what Max has to offer. One area that I think is generally overlooked by Max users is the ability to use Max as an algorithmic composition language for acoustic composition.

I’ve stumbled upon these abilities after playing around with a few different languages/environments that function as compositional tools. PWGL and Common Music are both nice, I’ve even taken a course in Common Music, but they’re both Lisp-based (which for me makes them awkward – C is my first language, and I still think in terms of nested loops and function calls).

PD doesn’t really have any built-in tools for anything, which is good and bad – it forces you to really think through a problem, thus ending up with a totally unique and personal solution, but it also takes forever to accomplish complex tasks.

I tried using straight C/C++ to build my own tools, but that was ridiculous. I am not interested in spending more time than I have to for coding.

Max has the [zl] object, which provides a bunch of list-processing functions, many similar to some of the methods found in SuperCollider. There are sorting and comparing functions, along with iteration and scrambling capabilities. I mean, try using PD to make a random tone row generator which assembles a random list containing no repeated elements. In Max, it’s literally like two objects. Simple.

Now, not to sound like a Cycling ‘74 ad, because proprietary software still kinda sucks and makes a lot of things more difficult for us, and because the help browsing in Max 5 is broken in Snow Leopard, but I think this is a fruitful area to explore.

You might want to check this out, too: Karlheinz Essl’s: RTC-lib