Hi everyone,
I’ve published a little SuperCollider program, Estyk.
Sound design isn’t revolutionary, 4 sound sources (WhiteNoise, Impulse, FM and Sampler) are passed through effects to generate ‘noisy’ sound textures.
As often with me, this was mostly about GUI design:
This is heavily related to the GrapicalModule Quark, and was done in two steps:
- I had a concert coming and wanted to test the Quark to see if I could get a working ‘live-instrument’ prototype ready in less than a day. This allowed me to check bugs, classes and documentation usage, etc.
- After this, a friend of mine asked me to share the code for a performance she was planning. The prototype wasn’t that ugly, but still far from what I had imagined at first. I wanted to see how far I could push the GUI design before publishing it.
Someone asked me “How the hell am I supposed to know what this control does ?”. That’s the neat part, you don’t. Just test it and see what’s going on. I was happy to be able to design an interface which at best only gives hints about controls usage. There’s no written language on the interface, only symbols and colors. As such, being a complete music beginner or a super expert doesn’t make no difference when trying the software the first time (well it does, but you know what I mean). This tries to bring back some intuitiveness/accessibility to computer music.
One of the reason I like SC over traditional DAWs is that creative process isn’t restricted to sound design only: the architecture setup of the sound design algorithm itself is creative. This was one of the reason why I designed the GM Quark: to extend SC’s GUI design creative possibilities, allowing to work more deeply with graphic designers (I hope). Estyk’s gaphics take inspiration in comics/video game culture.
Have fun making (and breaking) things,
Simon