A couple of weeks ago my colleague Barth mentioned Processing to me. I knew the works of John Maeda and Ben Fry from a number of years back, but I found it too small, too closed at that time. Now I was surprised by the growth of the platform and the community. I decided to give Processing a try during my holidays. More about that work later...

Linked on the Processing site I found ChucK, a new audio programming language. I see a lot of possibilities to create audio by visual means.

I have created a demo application to let Processing and Chuck talk to each other through OSC. The demo loads 4 audio files. Volume and panning values are controlled by Processing and sent to ChucK. ChucK analyses the sound spectrum and sends back analysis data.

This is a non-interactive sketch, but interactivity would be trivial to add. PS: if this demo looks a bit similar to SoundField, this is no coincidence...

The demo needs ChucK to be installed, so it won't play on a web page. But this is how the demo will look like (listen with headphones):

Yes, I have updated the video as well. Watch the previous video demo on YouTube

Downloads

• Demo application (Mac, Windows, Linux)
  • You need Java to run the application, to be downloaded from http://www.java.com/getjava/
• The Readme text with installation instructions
• Source code for Processing and ChucK

My first Processing and ChucK demo had a major pain - you needed to start and stop ChucK from the command line. No longer!

In this new demo Processing sends out messages to monitor.ck. When this program no longer receives any updates it shuts down ChucK. So starting and stopping ChucK is now done by Processing.

The demo sends mouse coordinates (x and y) to a ChucK application, helloworld.ck, to change freqency and harmonics of a 'Blit' (STK band-limited impulse train).

This is how the demo looks like (listen with headphones):

Downloads

• Demo application (Mac, Windows, Linux)
• The Readme text with installation instructions
• Source code for Processing and ChucK