jlooch

These buttons turn on and off various sound-producing threads in java. Very useful if your machine is a bit, er, "underpowered". I tested this on an 800 Mhz pentium, an iMac, and a 266 Mhz pentium (laptop). Runs fine on the faster pentium and iMac, but I could only run a few of the threads simultaneously on the older (266) pentium.

Of course, these little buttons are also useful if you really can't stand some of the sounds.

The button in the red/+ state () means the thread is running; in the bluegreen/- state () the thread is stopped.

These sliders control the probability that certain sound events will occur. At the top of the slider range, the probability is 1.0. At the bottom, it just won't happen (probability = 0.0). Bear in mind that because of the slowness of events in this soundscape, you probably won't hear these sliders have an immediate effect. In fact, even when the probability is set to 1.0 nearly all the events have about a 5-10 second interval between them. Patience is, of course, a great virtue.

The default settings of the sliders reflect one particular setup that I enjoy in the comfort and privacy of my home. I have the probabilities fairly low on three of the threads to give plenty of "space" in the music. I'm just that kind of guy.

Well gawrsh, I done fergot what this one does. Shucks.

The Ancient History of jlooch

Years ago (like, in the OLDEN DAYS, c. 1988-89) there was a fabulous computer called the NeXT machine. It came with a nice package of Objective-C classes and libs called the MusicKit (I think you can get a contemporary version of it at musickit.sourceforge.net). The MusicKit compiled to code that executed directly on a Motorola 56001 DSP chip included in the computer. Thus it was possible to run sound-producing processes on the machine with virtually no load on the host processor. Back in the days of 25 Mhz 68030 main CPUs, this was a Big Deal.

In order to learn the MusicKit, I wrote a simple app called "Looching" that generated long, droney tones -- I love to have this gunk going in the background while hacking, reading, writing, etc. I guess I was a Gregorian-chanting monk in a former life. Something rather remarkable happened after posting the code to various ftp sites. I started getting e-mail from all over zee world from people who enjoyed "Looching". Amazing! I didn't dub a single cassette! The Future is Now! This was a few years before things like Mosaic (remember that?), the World-Wide Web, Netscape, "surfing the web", etc. became the independent memes that have infested our collective consciousness today, and I was totally enthralled by the possibilities of a networked world.

Since that time, I've become older, more jaded, more cynical, yeah... all that... been there, done it, been back, got bored... but I still have a soft spot in me heart for them droney sounds.

By the way, "Looching" was reinstantiated in a number of different forms. Here's a listing of a few:


Looching2.0.tar.gz -- the original source files for the NeXT version
Contemporary MusicKit Looching -- a version ported to the new MusicKit (maintained by Leigh Smith)
mlooch -- a recent version created using Max/MSP. Although I did mlooch about the same time as jlooch, mlooch makes different droney sounds. Go ahead -- try it out! The web page is fairly similar to this one.
crudeLooch.c -- a really stripped-down and basic version (no interface) in C for RTcmix
RTcmix Looching -- a nicely-interfaced version done by Luke Dubois using RTcmix
loochlisp -- a version of looching in the lisp language gcl, using RTcmix

Semi-Silly Answers to Semi-Silly Questions

Q. Why is it called jlooch?

"Looch" was the name of a wonderful dog we owned through most of the 1980s. Unfortunately, Loocher passed away a number of years ago, but the Spirit of the Looch still lives on... the hound was amazingly mellow and had a darned good approach to life. She lived to the ripe old age of 15 years, not bad at all. We should all live such happy lives.


Q. What is the story with all these references to dogs, woofing, barking, etc.?

The most direct reason is implicit in the previous answer. Another Fun Factoid: the first networked CMC (back then the EMC) computer was "woof.columbia.edu". Looch (the dog) had an incredible howl, and we used a digital recording of it for testing and demonstrating a lot of our software back in the wild days. For several years, Loocher claimed the title of 'most digitized canine'. We used to call our users' group meetings of people doing computer music at Columbia woofmeetings. We were strange.


Q. How does jlooch work?

Basically, the main thread just schedules some long tones and then sleeps for 10-20 seconds while the tones spin out. jlooch adds a few other features, like a cheesy neo-70s synth-sequencer riff that pops up now and then. The long sleeps() were important to take the load off the processor in the original NeXT version. Nowadays it doesn't really matter because the host CPU is doing the sound synthesis chores as well as the simple algorithmic scheduling. But these machines are all so fast! Yikes!

For more detailed info, just scan the source code for the JSyn version. It's a little tangled; I was learning-by-doing in this one.


Q. Why won't it run properly on my machine XXX?

Huh. Good question.

Actually, I probably won't know the answer. I do know that java is rather brittle in general on Macintoshes, although I have tested jlooch on an iMac running OS9.something. It does seem to run better under Internet Explorer than Netscape. I also checked it on several Windows (95/98) machines, and the app happily droned away. I did my development on a RedHat7.1 linux machine, but it will only run as a standalone app on linux because there exists no linux JSyn plugin yet (boo hoo!). I didn't test it as a standalone app under Windows or MacOS.

Problems may also occur because of the particular version of java or java plugin being used. To be honest, I can't make much sense of Sun's naming conventions, so I am unable to say definitively which javax.x.x.x.x.x.x/JRE/SDK/swing/beans/othergodawfulcutesyname you should use for the interface and JSyn to work together properly.


Q. Why is this web page so dull and boring? Why don't you have fancy Shockwave or Flash things happening? Where's all the nifty graphics and colors?

Sorry, I am old and tired.


Q. Are there any known bugs?

Yes.

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