One Reason Why I Love SC

140 characters...

play{Splay.ar(SinOsc.ar(9,SinOsc.ar(midicps((Sweep.ar(0,(33..3))%128&(Sweep.ar(0,(3..9))%(LFSaw.ar(3)*9+99)))+33),0,pi)))/3}//#SuperCollider

If we run this line in SuperCollider we hear this...

and using Rohan Drape's great sc3-dot quark and swap play{} with draw{} in the line above, this mess gets revealed...

(click image for hi-res version)

So with a single line of code - short enough to fit in a twitter tweet - we've built this amazingly complex sound synthesis patch. I can not imagine a system with greater code-to-noise ratio than SuperCollider.

And this one is pretty fun to .draw as well...

play{f={|o,i|if(i>0,{SinOsc.ar([i,i+1e-4]**2*f.(o,i-1),f.(o,i-1)*1e-4,f.(o,i-1))},o)};f.(60,6)/60}//#SuperCollider

A heavily recursive patch that looks almost fractal. The PDF file generated from this line of code is 300kB! The number 6 in the code means recursion depth and 60 is the base frequency.

To use the sc3-dot quark in SuperCollider on a mac you'll need Graphviz (I use 2.28 on my OSX 10.6.8). You also need to make sure the resulting .dot files open automatically in Graphviz and not Photoshop, Word or something. (Get info on a .dot file in Finder and change all filetypes to open with graphiviz. You'll find the .dot files from sc3-dot in your hidden /tmp directory)