(Note: this is an archival project that I'm toying with the idea of modernizing a little bit. Expect it to be old, weird, sloppily coded and buggy.)
Generate and control noise using a joystick. The noise is generated with wave terrain synthesis and genetic programming (a la an older experiment, Madsyn, using terrains typed out as S-expressions (Lisp-style) as a starting point.
The idea sounds way cool, doesn't it? But in practice it's hard to control and tends to make minor variations on the same ambulance-siren-y sound no matter what you do. Nevertheless, I played a show using this on Friday, February 13, 2009, the debut of my noise band Extremities. I apparently wrote the whole thing during a 7-hour period prior to playing the show.
This program also generates patterned visuals that are kind of more interesting than the audio.
- Install SDL libs (libsdl1.2-dev on Debian/Ubuntu)
- Run ./build
- Hook up a USB joystick
- Run ./terrain
- Mess around with the joystick
Very important: press joystick buttons 5 and 6 together to quit. If you try pressing Escape, Q, Control-C, etc, you are not going to make it quit.
This was originally written sloppily to only support OpenBSD's audio interface. I've hacked up the code to get it to compile and sorta work on Linux, but the audio cuts out a lot, so there's more work to be done. If it compiles/works as is on OS X or Windows, I would be thrilled to hear of it.
I release this software to the public domain (and/or license it) under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.