Computational Arts by Matthew Brown

In the week 4 of KKB210: Computational Arts 1, we looked at Java, specifically Java and the Processing programming environment. Now as we are looking at it from a computational arts perspective rather than a software design perspective, we just focused on generating graphics with Java and using the rendering model built into Processing.

So the first thing we did was learn how to create a canvas and draw a box.

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Processing is an open source Java programming environment that was conceived in 2001 by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas, and is continually being maintained and developed by them today along with an ever growing community.

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Following on from the MIDI-based piano idea that I outlined earlier, today we will be going through writing a drum machione in Impromptu as was done in the KKB210 Computational Arts 1 week 3 tutorial.

You may have noticed that it is a bit of a pain to have to evaluate each note each time you want to play it. There is an easy way around this that we have used in the drum machine tutorial that can be applied to pretty much anything that needs to repeat in Impromptu.

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As part of the tutorial in week 3 of KKB210, Computational Arts 1, we were introduced to the Scheme programming language through the Impromptu environment.

We were looking at creating audio based on the Apple Sound Bank Synthesizer using the MIDI specifications.

As an introduction to this topic we started off simply by writing the code to play a single note on a piano.

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Impromptu is a programming environment that is intended to assist in the creation of computational arts of all varieties and is completely new to me.

It is designed for OS X, and this is probably part of the reason I have not come across it before since it was only November that I seriously started using a Mac.

Impromptu uses the Scheme programming language and is particularly suited to live programming, however in using it myself, it is obvious that the features built into it to assist live programming make regular programming much easier as well since changes can be made on the fly.

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