RLPF.ar

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Jack2

[Geek stuff...]

Preparations for the Affectations shows at the Kennedy Center were marred by a limitation policy of Jack1. What's Jack1? It's the first major incarnation of the Jack Audio Connection Kit, a Linux audio server designed for professional-grade audio work. One of its main jobs is to make sure that the audio keeps flowing. Toward that end, it has a brutal zero-tolerance policy: any application using the server must finish its calculations in time, or it will be killed. The consequence for Affectations was that the SuperCollider server would crash whenever CPU use got too high. This prompted hours of painful debugging.

Jack2 has a more tolerant approach. If a client (sound-producing) application takes too long, you'll hear a hiccup in the audio result but nobody has to die. A momentary spike in CPU use no longer ends the show.

So what's the problem? Every so often, Jack2's CPU use would jump to a ridiculous level and those glitches would creep in. Not so bad when working at home, but in a show? Unacceptable! The audience didn't come to hear the computer not working properly.

I spent a lot of time asking questions on web fora, reading articles, and looking at obscure configuration files on my system, all to no avail. Then I thought, "Maybe it's time to try that real-time kernel I've been avoiding." One installation and reboot later, and the problems are gone! Everything's working beautifully. It makes me wonder why I put it off for such a long time.

[No more geek stuff...]

Last night, my department staged an event by the film-scoring majors. Their final projects were to produce music for live-acted scenes inspired by actual movies, and then perform the scenes with the pre-recorded music in front of faculty and students. That had train-wreck written all over it, except... it was an absolute blast! It was almost too much to see my students take on the characteristics of French pickpockets (Le Mozart des pickpockets), Nicolas Cage and John Travolta (Face/Off), Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in a very campy sendup of The Devil Wears Prada, and even the romantic pairing of Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor from Waterloo Bridge. The pickpockets were a surprise -- fresh-faced youngsters mimicking a distinctively French style of jaded world-weariness. Special mention goes to the Cage/Travolta duo for unexpectedly dynamic fight scene choreography.

Varying quality in the music. The students have some distance to go in terms of professional production technique, but the best sound cues showed creativity and sensitivity. Hats off especially to the student who worked on Waterloo Bridge for recognizing the power of pauses between isolated string chords.

Certainly lots of fun, and great to see a side of my students that I don't see in the classroom (where they're usually afraid to speak up!).