A Report From Beyond: Linux Sound & Music At Virginia Tech

Dave Phillips — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0000

From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VT's own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.

Brad Garton: A Man, His Books And Toys

Brad Garton is the director of the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. His involvement with electronic/experimental/computer music is extensive and rich with associations and accomplishments, and he continues to stay on the edge of new developments in music technology. His presentation at the DISIS fest included an improvisation with his own iRTCmix synthesis software running on an iPhone and controlled by a fascinating instrument called a Manta.

iRTCMix is a logical extension from Brad's RTCmix, an on-going collaborative project that adds realtime scheduling and other features to Cmix, a computer music language designed by composer Paul Lansky. While RTCmix and the original Cmix run on Linux, iRTCmix has been designed for use with Apple's iOS and its supported devices.

Brad demonstrated how iRTCmix can be used to provide synthesis and algorithmic composition capabilities to an application destined for an iPhone. Superficially it's a simple affair - you write your program on a host equipped with Apple's Xcode SDK and the iRTCmix library, connect your phone to your machine via USB, prototype your app and send it on to the external device. Brad's demos showed off some neat synthesis and GUI capabilities, but alas, the whole process depends on Apple's decidedly proprietary SDK, so Linux is barred from the shop. That process was interesting to observe, but I found as much fascination in Brad's account of his dealings with Apple.

Given the restrictions imposed by the hardware, Brad coaxed a lot of interesting sounds out of his applications. He agreed that programming for the iPhone and similar devices forces the programmer to attend to the hungry details of his or her code, harkening back to Ye Olden Tymes of "bumming" code in order to squeeze the most action out of very limited resources.

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A Report From Beyond: Linux Sound & Music At Virginia Tech