[quote="forge"]I think what's happening for me at the moment is as I'm actually managing to cope with the IT unit I'm doing I'm starting to realise I can actually get my head around the whole coding thing - I sort of assumed I wouldn't have the kind of right brain for it, but I'm starting to get it and it's not so hard after all - and I'm starting to see the potential[/quote]
AAArggh, I've been meaning to harass the forum about this for ages. A scripting language for Ableton would be FANTASTIC - and would make it much more effective for things like audio installations and interacting with the outside world in novel ways, as well as composition and performance.
I'm a fairly newbie Java programmer, and the object orientation of that language would be enormously suitable for ableton. In fact, I'm kind of presuming, given the way Ableton works, that it's already OO.
One of my maniacal plans includes evolving sounds, using the brains of listening humans as the landscape on which they live or die. Mwaa haa. E.g. starting with a series of loops, getting people to listen and score them (even just with a live or die score), then using a genetic algorithm to breed new ones. (In my head, I have this mental picture of a mile-deep club under the earth somewhere, full of lab-rat clubbers in a series of connected booths; an automated system rates the success of a tune based on the kinetic energy in the room, and breeds successful songs with others... but that's just me. Ahem.)
The Ableton folk wouldn't need to start complicated. Actionscript for flash didn't, but it soon evolved into a fully fledged object oriented language.
An example of where I'd find it useful: I often do the following -
1. set a mix of drumloops and other clips to follow action: random
2. set em all to legato
3. Play and record
4. Harvest the best of the weird mixes you get - produces some bloody silly sounds, but it keeps me entertained! Example of using these sounds in a walk this way remix -
http://www.ww3.me.uk/songs/walkthiswaymash.mp3
That's the kind of thing you could code; and tweak the code in very interesting ways. Pseudocode might be:
Load x samples
Play y sample at the first and third beat IF the amplitude is over z and the amplitude at time+1/4 beat = half that (indicating a punchy sound)
Stick into arrangement track 1 at bar 100 and Mixdown result into "ick.wav"
Er, god, I'm going on about this rather too much. Geek? Me? Nah.
cheers
