HOT!

Congratulations! I’m excited to listen later!

@kyro This is incredibly helpful. Thank you!

Thank you.

The only reason is that I'm trying to avoid a tangle of wires in order to keep my head straight! I saw it worked at message rate and was wondering if I was missing something.

I'd like to join a large number of oscillator outputs into a single bus with [join] and then disaggregate them at the other end. Is there an object that sends each item in an intput list to a separate output?

I’m looking to do some Fourier analysis, finding the amplitude of an arbitrary, relatively small number of dominant frequencies and phases. My intention is then to reassemble the sounds using different waveforms to find interesting artifacts.

I guess it’s possible that someone has already built such a patch, and I’d love to see it. But I’m having a hard time understanding how to use the FFT objects in general, and I’d love some help building the first, analytical phase of this project.

@gn Fantastic. I’m going to have to mess with this patch.

Thanks! Looking at it, I understand it far better than the description. I might need this at some point!

@seb-harmonik.ar Irrespective of whether it's more efficient in terms of processor overhead or whatever, the important thing is that it's more efficient conceptually for a large number of beginners. And, unlike, say, Scratch, it's really worth becoming an expert in it. There's a LOT you can do, and for certain creative directions, it's far closer to optimal.

I mean, maybe you’d have gotten two people into SuperCollider and the other six would have abandoned the entire avenue of inquiry.

Have you shared the patch you built? It’s not something I understand, but I’m curious to see your yarn ball.

@MikeMorenoDSP

I'm now curious about what software you could use to build this macro keyboard, let me know

I've built keyboards in the past with an Arduino Pro Micro, a multiplexed array of switches, and Arduino code.

Next time I'll probably just do a diode array instead of the multiplexers. I don't much like C so I might also take a shot at doing it with a Raspberry Pi Pico and CircuitPython because I dislike Python less than C and I suspect it's a better introductory language for my students.

If it's at all possible to do it with Pd I will, though. I see toolsets that compile it for certain microcontrollers (Teensy, Daisy) but I don't know how broadly true that is, and a $4 microcontroller is far more valuable to me than a $30 one. Because if you screw up a $4 microcontroller you have an $8 microcontroller budget on the project, but if you screw up the $30 one you have a $60 microcontroller budget and probably have to wait to get it because you didn't get a pile of them in tape packaging to use with kids who are just learning to solder.

@seb-harmonik.ar I suspect that kind of arc is really common. I found BASIC to be impenetrable and HyperTalk to be magical. LISP made more sense to me than C did by a long shot.

@ddw_music Your concerns are the opposite of those for introducing programming to kids who need to be conceptually literate in a microcontroller-saturated world. If they need hardcore data structures, they'll keep learning new environments and languages. Right now, we have a society with dangerously low literacy in the machines they use all day every day. Those kids aren't all going to become computer scientists, but unless they learn that machines don't "don't want to work", but instead are following algorithmic processes that might include errors, the world is increasingly mysterious to them.

Requiring teenagers to learn a C-derived language culls out kids with no talent for computer science (not to mention the kids with talents in computer science that don't happen to stem from the same sensibilities as the teletype) but it doesn't make a literate society.

We don't require kids to read Infinite Jest or House of Leaves when they start to read. They read Dr. Seuss and Lewis Carroll because they show you how English works, including how to hack it for your own purposes.

You didn't learn data structures first. You learned first by hacking around with something that made a little sense, but was beyond your understanding, and you took stuff apart. That works for a lot of people who are inclined lexically in a teletype-compatible way. But lots and lots of people aren't. Programming languages aren't typed monospace because it's the best, proven way. It's because Grace Hopper had access to a teletype and mnemonic sets of letters both made sense to her and were compatible with the technologies available at the time. Its current commonality is a historical accident.

The gap between "kid languages" like Scratch and, say, Java has to do with pedagogical, philosophical blind spots in computer science, where computer scientists reproduce other computer scientists like themselves. And that means that computer science has entire areas that are underexplored, and things like Pd, SmallTalk, HyperTalk, and even Minecraft show paths not taken, with no guarantee that there are not lush forests of new kinds of understanding down those paths.

@oid No, the issue is with the way her hand interacts with the keyboard. Custom building a keyboard is well within my capabilities and (eventually) within hers as well. The important thing is that it has to be at a different set of angles than one for the average human hand. I'm hoping that by the time she graduates, she'll be designing in Fusion360 and printing herself adaptive parts with abandon. But definitely some sequential key combinations are a good idea.

Chords are particularly difficult for her because of both the angle of her wrist and some disobedient fingers.

@MikeMorenoDSP Yeah, not only am I a high school teacher, but we're in one of the poorest districts in New England. It would be wildly unethical for me to suggest a tool that costs money to kids who often don't have stable housing. Never mind whether I could afford it on my own salary. Anything that has a license that could prevent the kid from using it in the future — particularly if it winds up something they rely on materially or even creatively — makes that license the wrong choice.

@MikeMorenoDSP I am SO excited about this! Thank you!

My AI professor back decades ago wished that he could start programming with MAX, but it was completely out of the range of the students. I'm hoping to pick up his dream, particularly since he's at a new institution that requires that he teach beginning computer science in Java (?!?)

Are there compatibility issues between them?

I'm a makerspace teacher in an alternative school in Western Massachusetts. I have a student with cerebral palsy who's interested in programming, partly because she's quite creatively compelled and partially because being able to program would allow her to build devices that are otherwise hard for her to use, like game controllers. It turns out she also has an interest in electronic music. So that got me thinking about Pure Data.

One of the things that's hard for her is typing. She's got fewer working fingers than most of us, but loves playing Minecraft and is learning to draw. Typing is really hard for her and leads to chronic tendonitis, which is really painful on top of the difficulty of typing with only a few fingers.

I'd started building a visual programming language a while ago intended for microcontrollers, but I'd like to get something running sooner than it will even have a working prototype. That development might take years and Pd already exists in solid shape.

Its interface, though, even in its Purr Data form, still makes a new user do reverse lookup to try to find out what functions exist in a separate document, rather than being able to choose ones that work, and requires them to repeatedly type in object names. I see that there have been a couple of attempts at making an autocomplete system, but I don't see any that currently work. Is there work being done on this currently?

Aside: I have an idea for a fun project with the kid of building a macro keyboard that would give them quick access to the existing list, but that's a huge workaround (even though it's probably a really fun project).