Basic Electroacoustics II: Programming and Electronics for Art & Music |
| Music G6602 |
| Tuesday 3-5pm, Room 313 Prentis Hall |
| Spring 2010 |
| hello. |
| Professor: Douglas Repetto [douglas at music columbia edu] |
| TA: Damon Holzborn [damon at zucasa dot com] |
| hello. |
| Our Motto: "Why and how." |
| hello. |
| syllabus | schedule |
Both Python and the command line are a next step towards your glorious hacker future. They're tools that are not as domain-specific as Processing, which means they're a bit more difficult to get your head around at first, but they're ultimately quite powerful.
The command line
The command line is a text-based interface for your computer. Instead of using the mouse to click on things, you type commands into a text "terminal." Why would you want to do that?
If you search on "command line tutorial" you'll find lots of semi-useful sites that go over the basic commands. We'll do a quick tour through this one.
ls list files and directories
ls -a list all files and directories
mkdir make a directory
cd directory change to named directory
cd change to home-directory
cd ~ change to home-directory
cd .. change to parent directory
pwd display the path of the current directory
cp file1 file2 copy file1 and call it file2
mv file1 file2 move or rename file1 to file2
rm file remove a file
rmdir directory remove a directory
cat file display a file
less file display a file a page at a time
head file display the first few lines of a file
tail file display the last few lines of a file
grep 'keyword' file search a file for keywords
wc file count number of lines/words/characters in file
command > file redirect standard output to a file
command >> file append standard output to a file
command < file redirect standard input from a file
command1 | command2 pipe the output of command1 to the input of command2
cat file1 file2 > file0 concatenate file1 and file2 to file0
sort sort data
who list users currently logged in
Python
Here's a good list of Python tutorials. We'll stroll through a little bit of this one.
An example!!!
We'll take a quickquick look at the EchoNest remix API as an example of using Python and the command line to make music. We'll make a remix example that prints out beat locations and durations in an mp3 file and then manipulates that data using various command line commands.