How did you meet ChucK

[Kassen]

[MrJiveBoJingles]

I just met ChucK today, on this site.

I played with CSound and Supercollider a little bit years ago, but had been using conventional DAW / sequencers until getting into Max/MSP about six months ago. I had heard about ChucK once quite a while back but had never tried it, so I decided to go for it today. The thing that really caught my interest was the "One Line ChucK Crazy" thread in this forum, I wanted to plug those short bits of code in and see what resulted. I have to say I'm quite impressed with ChucK so far and it looks like delving into it will be lots of fun.

[Inventor]

[MrJiveBoJingles]

[kijjaz]

Wow! Welcome also MrJiveBoJingles.

I'm still excited about ChucK's new 1.2.1.3 features / bug fixes. Now I feel like I'm opening to a new area I can think in ChucK.

[cbit]

Hello all, I'm a musician living in Rotterdam. I first started hearing about chuck via users on em411.com. For the last few years I've been hopping around between different audio patching/programming toolkits/frameworks. Reaktor -> Max/MSP -> Supercollider

I saw a few live shows that encouraged me that the creation of engaging live Em is possible, and within reach, without even having to sacrifice the things that got me interested in EM to begin with (the possibility for 'robotic' timing precision, control over sound). For instance: I saw TokTek perform using (among other things) a pair of joysticks and STEIM's LiSa, I remember being impressed by that program: it's clarity of purpose, a worthy successor to experiments with audio tape, not something for playing back soundbanks.

In the middle of struggling with writing a mlr-like monome patch in supercollider, I went to the STEIM jambouree and saw Kassen there explaining his joystick sequencer setup. What an ingenious solution, I thought. His talk was a convincing demonstration to me that chuck was capable of good results in the area I'd been building patches for (rhythm-lead electronic music created in real-time).

I've recently finished a 'first version' of my own HID-centric sequencing system. Which was another battle, this time with Max/MSP playing the opposition (dragging a thousand graphical patch cords isn't suitable way for a human to spend his time). Right now i'm working on a follow up to that system, but this time I'm using chuck as its basis. I was very happy to find LiSa among the Ugens (what's its relation with the STEIM app btw?).

This looks like a nice forum

[Kassen]

[Inventor]

So Kassen evangelized you with his talk, way cool man! You'll have to check out my laptop battle performance sometime. Best to ya, newbie chuckist!

Les

[dichotomos]

I first started to learn Chuck at the beginning of the 2010 Winter term. I've taken two classes that sucked me into this warped world rather quickly. This world has exposed me to several different ways to think of audio and electronics. Max Msp, Chuck, Processing, Arduino, and some what related electronics prototyping and circuit bending are all very exciting. I can't believe I was investing so much time into typical DAWs (when I could of been inventing one)......or at least these programs give me the ability to conceive and execute my plan.

Chuck, Processing and Arduino have sparked my interests in C/C++ programming obviously because of the language similarities. Which in turn help my knowledge of these and other countless C/C++ based programs.

Thanks Chuck you've made my life a muck (happily)

[frank discourse]

I met chuck accidentally while researching the sugar os and the tam tam suite of audio tools, i was excited to be able to give friends a live cd allowing them a taste of the virtual modularity i enjoy using with the synthedit platform and was impressed that tam tam included self generating algorhythums as part of their educational sequencing package.

When i saw the more developed scripting environments they (sugarlabs) were running as part of some of their other apps it awoke my dormant
inner 'coding nerd' that had been asleep since i taught myself actionscript within flash, and i started searching for implementations of python for audio coding as the sugar os built its modular gui on this i think.

I think the chuck heading came up pretty high on the search results to memory and watching the you tubes on it quickly demonstrated some of the ways i could augment my current sound practise,( which is based around vast k2000 and synthedit ),with an efficient real time command line format.

I cant say enough good things about synthedit, jeff mclintock and the community based around it, and cannot reccommend SE more highly as an object based gui.however having other perspectives and being forced into different ways of assessing synthesis and composition is a very useful strategy to enrich understanding and creative practise generally.

I have a particular interest in self patterning environments and near periodic behaviors so finding the electro music forum and in the first two days hearing inventor with his FANTASTIC show demoing boolean hardware and checking 'eems' wolfram rule implementation was very exciting.

At the moment i am involved in a project where explicit data sets are required as source/control data for audio and even with only cursory knowlege of chuck i can implement these easily by modding some of the examples and editing arrays.

the ppl involved here seem friendly and helpful so i feel comfortable asking for help and enjoy reading the posts.

thanks to Ge Wang and all those involved with chuck and electro-music.

[kkissinger]

I first heard about Chuck on the electro-music forums.

Ge Wang and Rebecca Fiebrink appeared at electro-music 2007 as Plork Beat Science and did a compelling set of Chucked music. They also gave a three hour seminar on Chuck. During that seminar I learned how to install Chuck and how to do some simple programming with it.

While I've worked through some of the Chuck tutorials, I've not really gone very far with it. Lately I've been involved with hardware construction and haven't had any time to put into software development.

For me to learn Chuck, I'd have to lock myself into a room for a few days and eat and breath nothing but Chuck. Incidentally, that is pretty much how I overcome learning curves on most things -- total immersion.

I suspect that, given Chuck's MIDI and OSC support, that there are many things that I would be able to do with it that I'm missing out on because I haven't put the time into it. Oh well.. maybe in a few months...

[kkissinger]

Speaking of Chuck...

it would be great if someone could do a seminar or demo on Chuck at the Kansas City Regional electro-music festival this summer. If you are reading this and are interested, please contact Shane Morris or me.

[Inventor]

Kevin, you are a man of quality, skill, and talent - I am not surprised that you learn with total immersion. You'll find that ChucK can model your modular synthesizer, so that's a good thing to try. Maybe if I'm at EM10 we can do a mini-session to get you up to speed (no promises on being there yet).

Les



[/left]

[kkissinger]

[jordan]

I grew up playing the saxophone, but went to college for computers because I wanted to go to school for something that would give me a good foundation for starting a career, and because computing was the thing I was naturally the most adept at that I could see myself doing as a full-time occupation.

While in college, I found the drum set at ronwinter.tv/drums.html and knew that I had to find a way to play this dinky drum set. It didn't hurt that I was, at the time, listening to Justice and Para One almost constantly. I looked up how to control my keyboard and found out it could be done with AppleScript, and I wrote my first audio-related code in AppleScript; it generated key press signals that would play the ronwinter drum set (https://gist.github.com/975144). The timing was awful, it commandeers your computer for the duration of play, and overall it sounds like poop, but it was fun to write. I knew I had to find something better, something that would allow me to do similar things. I messed around in FL Studio, got a copy of Reason that I wrote a few tunes in, tried my luck with Reaktor (no dice), and then realized I should be coding this stuff. I tried Nyquist but it was a little too tedious; I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get sound without having to do an enormous amount of work. (Lisp doesn't bother me in the slightest, it was the library I couldn't wrap my head around.) I simultaneously tried my luck with ChucK and SuperCollider and found ChucK made more sense to me. I noodled for a bit and it seemed fun, but coming from a background of playing with physical devices, I lost interest quickly.

When I found out about the Novation Launchpad, I picked one up and started to play with Ableton, but was put off by all the tedious drop-downery and checkboxing that goes with the hours and hours of making Live sets, and decided to try my luck at coding stuff myself in ChucK.

My big breakthrough was on Thanksgiving last year, when I got the Launchpad to act as an interface to control the pitch of a single uGen, complete with some light as feedback. Since then, I've never really had an interest in picking up other tools for generating sound; I realized I had found the tool I had been looking for, after trying so many different things. My primary interest is in learning about how to build instruments and ChucK facilitates that interest. Writing the code is only half the fun; the rest lies in figuring out how to play an instrument that, up until then, didn't exist.

[kkissinger]

[Inventor]

I would but I can't go, too poor.

Les

[heyandy889]

I met ChucK in KLOrk, the Kalamazoo Laptop Orchestra. I think that the date was Spring of 2009. I'm quite pleased to see that ChucK is still alive and kicking after a few years.

Found several great answers to programming questions in this forum. One was about the random number generator. Kind of strange when the computer doesn't act like you expect it to act! Anyways, thanks a lot for the discussion and code.

[Inventor]

heyandy889, nice to see some more forum activity, it's been quiet lately. We used to have some regulars who posted a lot, hope to get back to those days - would be fun!

Les

[TommyX]

once upon a time there was a guy who was searching for synthesizers for linux and stumbled upon chucK and got enchanted!

[briansorahan]

I am also searching for audio synthesis tools in linux. ChucK is my fav by far over PD and SC. Very easy to learn, quick to code in, baked-in concurrency, STK classes, dynamic code-loading ... I'm very impressed so far!

[wamo]

First off, HT to all who have been a tremendous help in getting me up and Chucking: ge (obviously), Kassen, Inventor, Kijjaz, Antimon, Blue Hell, Frostburn... just to start.

I first heard about ChucK while browsing the courses offered by Coursera.org (where I have taken several great, and free, on-line courses). As my background is in CS and I have a passion (not so much talent) for music I was interested in the "Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists" course by Ajay Kapur, from California Institute of the Arts. The course description stated that it would be using the "real-time multimedia language ChucK".

After signing up for the class I downloaded ChucK and within an hour I was hooked: July 29, 2013. Of course, along with being excited I was totally confused and it wasn't long before I found the electro-music forum (thankfully). It has been an invaluable resource for information and inspiration. Thanks to everyone who has participated!

The Coursera.org course: Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists https://www.coursera.org/course/chuck101 promises in the description:

"There will be special guest lectures from creators of the ChucK language, Dr. Ge Wang (Stanford University) and Dr. Perry R. Cook (Princeton University)"

So it would be very cool to see you all in this course. I suspect this forum will be getting some traffic; maybe it is time to get fired up again? What do you say Inventor? Kijjaz? Kassen? Who loves ChucK?

[Antimon]

wamo!

[wamo]

Antimon!

[defog]

I am chuck. Therefore, I cannot meet myself.

But in honesty, I was looking up posts about the MFOS "Soundlab" synth since I built the Ultimate and wanted to find some others that did as well, and Princeton's Soundlab website came up. Then I noticed the ChucK Programming Language listed on their site, then remembered glimpsing at it on this forum under DIY.

Now I'm playing around with it. I never got into MAX/MSP and probably should have considering the amount of experimentation I do. But after seeing ChucK and having spent the last 6 months learning C++ on a daily basis, this looks more intriguing to me now than MAX/MSP ever did.