Comment by pierrec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pierrec | Hacker News Reader

These days I've been working on a side project based on Sporth. I found the stack-based system is a really efficient way of representing audio graphs, and if you know a bit of DSP you can get the sound you want pretty quickly. I haven't even started using PolySporth, which seems like an important feature/complement to the language, but I'm still having lots of fun with plain Sporth. I wrote lots of Sporth scripts while learning the language, here's a couple:

Drone spirit - code (this one has comments): https://gist.github.com/pac-dev/af6f7b7b1786bf102c88592183de...

audio: http://007ee821dfb24ea1133d-f5304285da51469c5fdbbb05c1bdfa60...

Harmo - code: https://gist.github.com/pac-dev/f4c4cfdb1fb03bf6ede81aac4087...

audio: http://007ee821dfb24ea1133d-f5304285da51469c5fdbbb05c1bdfa60...

Monk voice - code: https://gist.github.com/pac-dev/76660a90406c4d8fe923fbb03094...

audio: http://007ee821dfb24ea1133d-f5304285da51469c5fdbbb05c1bdfa60...

These are quite beautiful. If you are willing, I would to add these examples to the Sporth distribution.

To be honest, you're not missing too much with PolySporth. Actually, you're better off pretending it doesn't exist for now ;) It was an experiment that tried to add concepts like polyphony and note events in time. Despite the serious time investments I put into it, I have never seriously used it. Maybe someday I'll re-examine it and do something interesting with it.

Happy Sporthing,

-P

Thanks! That's interesting, I've been unsure about the importance of PolySporth. It seems important if you want to create generative compositions in the traditional sense, by which I mean focusing more on the sequence of notes rather than the timbre. But for me, I think I'll always return to manual sequencing if I want to get this kind of traditional result. Whenever notes are generated, I just want to manually re-arrange them. I guess that's one of the reasons I still haven't learned PolySporth.

But if I want to create a piece where timbre is central (or if I want to work on the timbral portion of a piece that has both), then programming is actually a super effective tool, and that's where Sporth nails it for creative exploration.

As for using my examples, yes, you can totally use and modify them with attibution (I should probably add a proper licence :)

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