Software Systems
The development
of new forms of art often necessitates the development of new
tools to create the art with or new forums to experience the
art within. The malleability of the computer is one of the primary
reasons that artists are attracted to it. Producing our own software
tools, when needed, allows CRCA researchers to think far beyond
the constraints of commercially available systems and provides
tools and methodologies that extend far beyond the boundaries
of specific works. Miller Puckette's Max and Pd event authoring
environments have revolutionized the creation of real-time computer
music performance. And Harold Cohen's AARON project has provoked
considerable debate on the nature of creativity and the location
of the essence of artistic pratice.
Research Projects
 Shlomo Dubnov joined the UCSD Music Department and CRCA as a Faculty Researcher in the fall of 2003. His recent work addresses questions of analysis, modeling and generation of music using statistical
and communication approaches. He is interested in questions of quantative
modeling of musical information content, evaluation of music complexity,
measuring similarity relations between thematic materials and their
variation and their relation to listeners emotional experience. Applications of these methods include computer aided composition or
improvisation, creation and evaluation of emotive environments, as well as
more common problems of information retrieval and content based
processing.
Graphical Interface for Pure Data
by Joseph Sarlo, PhD candidate in Computer Music
GrIPD is a cross-platform extension to Miller Puckette's Pure Data software that
allows one to design custom graphical user interfaces for PD patches. GrIPD is not
a replacement for the PD Tcl/Tk GUI, but instead is intended to allow one to create
a front end to a PD patch. The concept is to create your PD patch normally and then
your GUI using GrIPD. You can then lauch PD using the -nogui command line argument
(although this is certainly not necessary) so only your custom front end will be
displayed. GrIPD, itself, consists of two parts: the "gripd" PD object and an external
GUI window/editor. The PD object was written in C and the external GUI was written in
Python using the wxWindows. GrIPD is released under the GNU General Public License.
-How GrIPD works-
The two parts of GrIPD communicate via TCP/IP sockets so they can run on one machine
or on separate machines over a network; so, for example, the GUI could be on a laptop
on stage controlling or displaying info from the PD audio engine in the house next to
the mixer. The communication works through PD's implimentation of "send" and "receive"
objects. Basically, each GrIPD control object has a send and receive symbol associated
with it.
Expr, Expr~, Fexpr~
Shahrokh Yadegari is developing the "expr" family which is composed of C-like expression evaluation objects for graphic music languages, such as Pd , Max/MSP , and jMax .
Aaron - The AARON program by Harold Cohen is an ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence.
CARL - The CARL package includes cmusic, an acoustic compiler program written by F. Richard Moore as part of the Computer Audio Research Laboratory (CARL) software distribution.
Fleece - Harry Castle wrote Fleece as a real-time 3D tool for sound motion in space.
Pd - Pd is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio and graphical prcessing written by Miller Puckette.
PWV - Interactive volin performance system.
TRAnSIT - "Towards real-time audio spatialization tools."
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