Dear list,
I am a long-time lurker here and even have occasionally written one or another
post here. As a long-time user/developer in/of SuperCollider, I am on and off
glancing at faust but currently I am very much serious in giving it a more
thorough listen.
And, since you asked for them, here are my comments/impressions of the faust
ecology so far. Please do not take them too serious, they are, after all, only
based on my (very limited and highly subjective) experience of the faust
ecosystem.
## high- vs. low-level programming and "common practice" in faust development
I'd like to support others in this thread (Dario, Sam, Gary), in their comments
that music-oriented tutorials/example material would be very beneficial for
people to better understand and use faust.
I am particularly with Gary when it comes to the available material; many of
the examples are either very basic (how to use a phasor, create a sine wave,
implement a pole-filter), whereas other existing projects and tutorials (e.g.
the "demo" tutorials) are already quite sophisticated and for me hard to
understand.
Those examples are also difficult to integrate into my own code, since they
often bring their own GUI elements; I'd rather have them expose their
parameters and take care of gui-related elements myself.
From SuperCollider development, I am used to deal with three levels:
+ low-level implementation of "unit generators" (C/C++)
+ assembly of synthesis engines ("SynthDef") from these components in an
imperative language, i.e. assembling pre-built blocks
+ high-level control of these synthesis elements in sclang
This division makes (most of the time) total sense, however it also has its
limitations (unable to change low-level behaviour easily, block-size-based
limitations on inter-ugen feedback, ...)
In faust, there is no such division (a good thing!), hence I have to create my
own (artificial) abstraction layers between microscopic and macroscopic
structure.
For diving into (my own active) faust development, I would be interested in how
people tackle this kind of complex interface in a faust-centered setup.
Maybe it would be beneficial to have some kind of workshop on how to e.g.
implement an experimental high-level synthesis system (supercolliderwould call
that "SynthDef" ) based on (pre-existing) LP/HP filters, oscillators, etc., and
another workshop on how to create high-order control such as reordering
components, playing several "SynthDefs" at once, creating a routing environment
for such "SynthDefs"?
-------------
## towards better code examples
It is fascinating to see, how much time and effort went into faust
documentation and tutorials. Many variants of teaching and accessibility (e.g.
via online courses and web environments) were tried, all of them have their
benefit and reason of existence.
However, it is difficult for me, as a newbie to faust, to understand, which are
the currently "official" tools to be used. As I understand e.g., the faustLive
system was pushed for some time but is now overcome by faustIDE / faustEditor
(which one is the way to go?).
As a sidenote, I really enjoyed (and still am enjoying) looking at
magnetophon's source-code for compressor building blocks:
https://github.com/magnetophon/faustCompressors because I understand not only
technical parts of the sources but also the reason why certain things are
implemented in that way. magnetophon really tries hard (and succeeds) to make
the implementation accessible to understand and alter.
I would be very happy to see more such code and also be encouraged to write
such extensively documented code in e.g. tutorials.
The existing tutorials are really cool, however, sometimes I have the feeling
that tutors are (understandably!) very much into the fact that things can be
expressed with really little amount of characters.
This, unfortunately, comes with a lack of readability (at least for the
unskilled tutorial follower), though. A more haskell-oriented styleguide in
which documentation is an integral part of the implementation would IMHO
benefit the tutorials.
--------------
## consistency
I am thrilled to see that consistency of documentation is currently pushed a
lot. I think it is very important for people to have a reliable source of
information that makes it easy to search and extract information from.
Thank you for that!
------------
cheers and thanks to everyone involved, faust is a really powerful tool I am
thrilled to investigate further!
Till
> On 1. Jun 2020, at 08:57, Giuseppe Silvi via Faudiostream-users
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello,
> I think Faust is an excellent musical tool. I approached it in 2013, during
> my master's studies in electronic music, and now it is my main means of
> teaching (electroacoustic and interpretation of the electroacoustic
> repertoire) and music composition.
>
> In my opinion, currently, the international musical community lives a deep
> scission between technology and literature, with a huge interest in
> technology and a great void of interest and knowledge about literature. This
> condition, at the edge, brings to the point of making the musical,
> compositional, interpretative use of musical software superfluous.
>
> Faust has an enormous resource, the open and multi-level access to the
> library structure. I like the necessity of this conversation, so thank you
> Yann, to evaluate if Faust could be the environment in which the library
> could contain perfect musical objects, like the actual perfect technical
> objects, and become the birthplace of a true electroacoustic community.
>
> We have started, in Rome, a process of consciousness (Faust Based) and we
> have some complete works
> - Michelangelo Lupone - Mobile Locale, for percussion and live electronics
> (porting from fly30)
> - Alvin Lucier - I'm sitting in a room (super-accessible environment)
> and we are working on Luigi Nono's Post-prae-ludium per Donau and Risonanze
> Erranti.
>
> https://github.com/s-e-a-m
>
> A student realized the Agostino di Scipio Ecosystem Audible 2.
>
> https://gitlab.com/DavideMaggio/ae
>
> So, I totally agree with Dario, Faust could be really complete with a library
> of musical instruments, we could aspire to be really complete filling that
> void.
>
> Thanks,
> Giuseppe
>
>
>
>> On 29 May 2020, at 10:50, Yann Orlarey <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> We plan to organize new Faust online workshops in the coming weeks. Among
>> the themes we have thought of, two of them involve contributions from the
>> community. And we'd love to hear what you think about them.
>>
>> 1/ Workshop Q&A
>> The idea would be to collect in advance questions and problems that you may
>> have about Faust and for which we will try to find answers. Then we will
>> organize a workshop where the most representative questions will be
>> presented as well as the answers we can give them.
>>
>> 2/ Workshop Faust based projects
>> There are now many projects that use Faust to varying degrees. The idea
>> would be to have the developers of these projects do a 10mn informal
>> presentation/demo of their project. We could imagine having a dozen or so
>> projects present
>>
>> The two other workshops we have thought of are:
>>
>> 3/ a workshop dedicated to architecture files and how to design them.
>>
>> 4/ a workshop for the general public on writing VST plugins with Faust.
>>
>> Tell us what you think. If the first two seem interesting to you, we'll
>> start collecting questions and projects very quickly.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Yann
>>
>>
>> Yann Orlarey
>> Directeur scientifique/Scientific director
>>
>>
>> [email protected] T : +33 (0) 4 72 07 37 00
>> GRAME - Centre national de création musicale
>> 11 cours de Verdun Gensoul | 69002 Lyon
>> www.grame.fr | facebook | instagram | twitter
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>
>
>
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--
Till Bovermann
https://tai-studio.org | http://lfsaw.de | https://www.instagram.com/_lfsaw/
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