Re: Music on Symbolics

Peter Paine wrote (quoting someone who is unamed):
>
>What would your assessment be for using Genera for realtime musical 
>applications?  What kind of machine do you think I'd need to obtain 
>usable results?

I think an ivory based machine could certainly do it, but I'm not sure
I'd recommend that to someone who is inexperienced.  The machines are
fun to use and generally reliable but they are old, and newer hardware
is much much faster.

If you *really* wanted genera, then the VLM running on modern hardware
would be plenty fast enough for midi events (I think/assume).  Getting
some integration to a USB based midi device would require a little
hacking, but not much.  But it would not talk to it off the shelf.

If it were me, I'd instead look at one of the nice scheme's out there.
I tend to use fair raw scheme implementations on embedded systems
running very small linux (like siod and tiny scheme), but the one's I've
used (PLT?) on windows have been really fun and nice to work with.  I'd
focus on a good debugging interactive environment if it where me.

(or, if you are - blech - common lisp oriented, I think SBCL is the way
to go, but it's a bit fascist for new folks; but it's damn fast)

scheme48 or the scheme shell might be a good place to go if you don't
mind using emacs (heh, personally I love emacs but it's not everyone's
cup of tea)

>If I had a kind of closed playground for helping me 
>efficiently model and experiment with my ideas, an environment where 
>I'm not getting bogged down by platform idiosyncrasies or compiler 
>issues, then I'd stand a chance of making good use of the working 
>time I'm not devoting to composing and performing.

yes, both forth and lisp can give you that.  Lisp even more so because
(opinion) you can leverage a lot more.

the interactivity is very nice.

(Why is a image of Peter Langston popping into my head?  note to self:
thank him for the smile I get every time I hear the ball blazer music :-)

You might go bug him... (www.langston.com)

>Incidentally, Lisp(/Scheme) is becoming a 
>kind of lingua franca among experimental musicians who use computers, 
>so I'll be committing to using it for the foreseeable future.

makes sense.  some of the earliest computer music things I've seen
where done on lisp machines.

-brad