Endlessly repeating...

Get started with Processing in Scala on Ubuntu

12 January 2010

I love Processing in a way that's almost unseemly for a gentleman and a programming language but there's something about Java that feels, how can I put this, a bit inelegant and crufty. Lots of braces, lots of type declaration and so on. That feeling put me on a search for a way to do cross-platform graphics in a tidier language. The options that I've come up with so far are:

I had a bit of a struggle getting started today with Scala so I thought I'd share a quick step by step for Ubuntu:

  1. Install Scala:

    sudo aptitude install scala
  2. Install Processing

  3. Create a file Test.scala and add the following:

    import processing.core._

object Test extends processing.core.PApplet {
    override def setup() {
        size(100, 100)
        }

    override def draw() {
        background(0)
        rect(10, 10, 10, 10)
    }

    def main(args: Array[String]) {
        var frame = new javax.swing.JFrame("Test")
        var applet  = Test
        frame.getContentPane().add(applet)
        applet.init
        frame.pack
        frame.setVisible(true)
    }
}

  4. Compile it:

    scalac -cp [path_to_processing]/lib/core.jar Test.scala

  5. Run it:

    scala -cp .:[path_to_processing]/lib/core.jar Test
  6. Hopefully you should see a window with a black background containing a white rectangle.

I have no idea whether I'm going to like Scala or not (to be honest Python is looking more promising at the moment) but it'll be interesting to see whether it's an improvement on straight Java for the kind of code I'm writing.

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MidiOSC now available on GitHub

11 January 2010

MidiOSC, the MIDI to OSC bridge that I've been beavering away on for the past couple of months, is now available for download on GitHub. I wrote it in response to the messed up state of MIDI support in Java on OSX. I do a lot of work with Processing and external hardware that talks MIDI so having things break at random when the OS was upgraded wasn't a good thing for me. Now I can just fire up MidiOSC and spit data in a modern format into any language with an OSC library (C, Java, Ruby, Python, Scala...). My sequencer for the Novation Launchpad and, likely, a lot of things I do in the future are only going to talk OSC so I thought I'd better make it available sooner rather than later. More on the sequencer soon...

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Sonified particle system

10 January 2010

I was digging through some of my old Processing sketches to find something to generate the background for this page when I stumbled across an experiment in particle systems that I'd been working on. The sketch generates a crude approximation of a gravitational field and then drops a load of particles on that change velocity according to their location. As you can see in the video this can lead to some nicely chaotic behaviour.

If you're anything like me, when you've got a source of chaotic data your first reaction is to hook it up to a synthesiser so I did exactly that. The sketch sends out an OSC message for every particle once per frame with a note number for the particle and a the distance from that particle to each of the gravity hills (hills produced more interesting behaviour than wells as it turned out). SuperCollider picks up the messages and generates four sound grains with different timbres (sine, pulse and saw) which have an amplitude that increases depending on the distance from the particle to the associated hill.

The results have a lot of movement to them which is what I was going for. You could of course do all sorts of things with the data stream, the sounds I chose were quick to code rather than especially pleasing.

Code for the processing sketch is available. It depends on the oscP5 library for Processing.

-

Resolute

10 January 2010

Alright then... My new years resolution was to share/shamelessly self-promote/shout into the void more often so with a view to doing that I've completely revamped my corner of the internet. The focus of things initially will be what I'm working on in SuperCollider and Processing but who knows where things will go. Wish me luck. And now on with the show...