Workshop Session 1

Thursday, March 13, 2025
2:45pm - 3:45pm

SPRAWL 3.0

Room 430

With support from:
Ishaan Jagyasi
Henry Windish

SPRAWL 3.0 is a new incarnation of a network-meta-instrument that has been developed since 2017. It is used for composition and performance of experimental electroacoustic music and in computer-music education. The recent version features 16 Access Points (AP) each consisting of a Raspberry PI 5, 10” touchscreen, audio interface and loudspeaker. All APs are peers in a server-less local area cluster, using JackTrip for a fully connected mesh audio network and an overlay network to ease OSC communication. SuperCollider (SC) serves as the main programming environment for creating configurations and AP software for improvisation and compositions. Audio can be flexibly routed though matrices in SC on each Access Point and GUIs allow musicians to interact with the meta-instrument. The basic idea behind SPRAWL is to explore different system configurations which are inherently connected to musical concepts. Some may use the system with additional musical instruments or microphones connected to each AP, while others work without additional input and create sound within SuperCollider. To make the reconfiguration of this complex system fast and robust, SPRAWL relies on professional admin-tools like Ansible to deploy concepts and configurations with a single command.

In a hands-on workshop/demo we show the capabilities of SPRAWL with 4-8 APs. Participants will create simple configurations and concepts from scratch by programming SC nodes on the Access Points and connecting the network ‘manually.’ They will also deploy existing concepts with Ansible, showing how advanced tools ease the use of a complex system.

The workshop is relevant to the following symposium topics: computational creativity, music performance, interactive music systems.

Live4Life

Room 1020

Led by Christophe Lengelé

The workshop is based on the demonstration of this spatial performance tool : https://github.com/Xon77/Live4Life. In addition to the “Live For Life programme”, I will simultaneously present a new programme that I am currently developing, which integrates Tidal Cycles, SuperCollider, and various extensions quark, including SuperDirtMixer. This system features a GUI and controllers that execute command lines in Tidal Cycles and control multiple patterns and their variables (tempo, duration, synthesis, effects, or functions in patterns). It functions as a form of live coding DJing, where lines of code replace traditional samples or records. The interface is still in development, and the code will be released just before the symposium.