SuperCollider
SuperCollider is a fantastic cross platform audio programming environment. It's used as the sound engine for the Monome Norns, but I hadn't really looked into it until recently.
I've been somewhat obsessed with it for the past few months and I've forgotten what lead me to pick it up.
I watched Eli Fieldsteel's 2023 lectures as a way of coming to grips with the basics. SuperCollider is a large language, and it's accumulated lots of functionality over the 30 years it's been around. Eli's class was excellent, and I'm now working my way through the book that his class notes became. The book is even better, with lots of downloadable code examples that go deep into the various topics.
Why I like it
- programmery reasons
- extremely flexible
- from smalltalk it takes the dynamic, late bound, everything is an object
- decent integrated help files
- it's very quick to do interesting things
- very easy to integrate midi control, or osc, or create simple GUIs
- simple to use it as a audio toolkit - recorder, scope, audio spectra
Here I am at MESS, using a linux tablet running supercollider with an audio interface for a signal scope and frequency spectrum. I can also plot control voltages (with a DC coupled audio interface). Quite handy while working out what the synth is doing. And I can easily record snippets of interest.
