South East England Overtone Hack Day, 3rd December 2011

Posted on 03 December 2011

Today was the inaugural South East England Overtone Hack Day. We met up in Cambridge to hack on Overtone, a live music performance environment in Clojure. Here are some of the things we covered:

Audiocubes

Tom (didn’t catch his surname, unfortunately) brought some AudioCubes, a set of control interfaces. They have infrared detectors and can detect nearby surfaces and other AudioCubes.

We discussed interfacing them to Overtone. They come with midi and OSC interfaces, which would be easy to work with; but the real power apparently comes from the C API, which allows you to discover the network topology of the AudioCubes. We discussed the possibilities for working with the C API from Clojure.

Other controllers

Tom and I also discussed some other controllers:

• TouchOSC
  • very low barrier to entry
  • not nice to rely on wireless connections in a live environment
• Launchpad
  • cost effective introduction to real hardware

Environment setup

As is inevitable, some time was spent getting people set up with Eclipse, Counterclockwise, leiningen, overtone, and so on. I made use of my previous blogpost on lein eclipse, which i had totally forgotten about…

Overtone basics

I went through my skillsmatter talk with Stefan, Tak and Edmund, to show them the basics of creating instruments, oscillators, and filters; and scheduling beats and tunes in time.

Signal processing basics

We also had an impromptu introduction to signal processing – time domain vs frequency domain, linear filters — low pass, high pass, band pass, Fourier series, and suchlike.

Clojure basics

Finally, we discussed resources for learning clojure itself: labrepl and 4clojure.

Overtone documentation

I also made a start on writing a filters page for the overtone wiki.

Summary

We all had a great time, we all learned something and achieved something, and there was a lot of interest for another event next month in London. So I will see you all next time!