[sugar] Fwd: TamTam roundup.

[Jean Piché]

Posted in devel. Just want to make sure people see this. List trouble  
this week, now fixed



*Apologies for dups


Hello all,

TamTam team has been on the sideline the last few weeks to let the  
academic year conclude. We are warming up the engine at half-crew  
until June13th and full tilt after that. We have proposals and many  
questions. Our task list until September/October will be like this:

1- Solidify TamTam on the new B4/B5s.

-  We have enough CPU/RAM and file space to do what we need to do.  
Chunking out the audio data seems reliable but we would like to have  
better keyboard response. Onkey presses feel laggy. This is largely  
due to our buffering. We currently use 128 blocks of buffering. 64 is  
desired, but it causes crackles due to CPU choking. This may not be  
true on the new machines. Be that as it may, I think it will always  
be difficult to run TamTam and another app at the same time. Is this  
really a big problem?

-  We are considering a move to a 22k sampling rate. This would  
improve audio quality famously, specially where headphones, pods and  
external speakers are used. This will be done with the sound bank  
revision, CPU performance allowing.

-  Resinstating microphone recording in mini and Edit and keyboard  
recording in Edit. We hope this will be straightforward.

-  Solve all popup window issues (yes, some remain)

-  We can do almost everything on the machines we already have but a  
B4/B5 will be essential to test the hardware performance.

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2- TamTam Jam and miniTamTam

It is still uncertain if TamTam Jam will be a separate sub-activity.  
We are thinking of making it an integral part  of miniTamTam, which  
would be renamed. The suite would thus revert to a three-prong  
affair: Play, Compose, Make sounds. The miniTamTam performance music  
loops we have been investigating are what motivated this rethinking  
(see below). Performance scenarios with sync locked loops will be the  
essence of TamTam Jam, along with screen feedback acting as a "tutor"  
for composed music.

We think TamTam Jam will be the most used TamTam app. Four of us put  
together a little performance at the Elektra festival  
(elektrafestival.ca) last week. It turns out the little machine makes  
a terrific orchestra instrument. We had beats going, sequences on  
individual keyboard keys, imported sounds from synthLab. We played  
only in miniTamTam. The four machines were connected to a minimal PA  
(something that can be found in the most unlikely places in the  
world). We did a little improv  and the concept of playing XOs as a  
band became immediately clear: people can make music together in  
groups. For rehearsal purposes, with four or five people sitting  
around a table, the small speakers are fine. We could use a little  
more volume of course, but in a quiet environment, they are quite  
usable.

* A hardware idea. Someone should think of the following device: a  
tiny line mixer with 8 inputs and 2 outputs .   Power requirements to  
include a modest line amplifier are minimal. This device could be  
used for group music making, teleconferencing activities and whenever  
you need to connect a number of machine audio together. Small plastic  
box, perhaps two or three per schools with a variety of adapters to  
connect to any loudsepaker.  I wouldn't be surprised if you could  
make these things for less than 50 cents.

One thing needs solving: a clock pulse over the mesh so the beats  
stay tight. As it is, you can start any number of machines on the  
default tempo, and the machines will stay in sync for as long as two  
or three minutes. This is musically useful but re-synching manually  
kills the "élan". So we need this clock. We have figured out how to  
do it in our code and will, in all likelyhood use the presence  
service. Right now however, the mesh remains slightly mysterious as  
to its usability. We can shortcut with a pipe to Csound itself and  
let it handle sync broadcast and reception outside the sugar  
environment but that seems the wrong way to go.

A central question remains:  Will a lightly loaded mesh (say, 10-12  
machines) show enough latency to be musically objectionable? In  
pratice, sync packets have to reach clients within 10ms, with a  
prefferred figure of less than 5ms. By the time the signal makes it  
up and down the software chain, it gives us something in the order of  
50ms to make the graphics do what they need to do at that moment.  
This is acceptable as a drop-dead timeframe. Outside this window, the  
music is just going to gradually "loose the  groove". Can the mesh  
support this rate continuously? If so, we have a mightily rich  
collaborative music setup.

For one flavour of TamTam Jam,  google "Dance Dance Revolution".

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3- Sugar conformity and integration.

We will need to travel to Boston for that and hopefully enroll Eben  
as a "scream-across-the-hall" consultant. As much time we spent on  
the look and feel of TamTam, we understand, accept and even look  
forward to making it fit into the Sugar graphical idiom. The Sugar  
controler toolkit is almost complete enough for our purpose. One  
thing we will miss is a bidirectional slider but this is fairly easy.

Kids want to know: Do we get editorial control over the final  
integrated look?

-----------------

4- TamTam tunes outside TamTam

We want to propose a simple embeddeable TamTam player so kids can put  
their compositions into documents. The player itself is simple enough  
to make. AbiWord would be the first target. Any comments by the Abi  
people would be welcome. This is perhaps a problem for OOM. Csound  
needs to be loaded and Csound pre-loads sound tables into RAM and the  
full library at 22k will pop a good 10 Mb. Is this realistic?

-----------------

5- Tutorials and field trials

TamTam Edit and synthLab are complex applications for a 10 year old.  
We look at those as something a kid can grow into and there is lots  
to learn there. We will develop text-free tutorials to show the kids  
how to use the apps. To that end: is there a flash player in the  
works that can be used at small overhead?

We are planning some with-kids analysis sessions in late June to see  
what works and what does not.  We also need feedback from kids abroad  
and developers who may have something to say about it. Are we  
expecting detailed reports from the field trials in Brasil and Nigeria?

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6- Sounds

The sound bank will be fully overhauled, hopefully at 22k sr. On the  
sounds themselves, what shoudl be the policy for a standard sound  
bank and what will be the mechanism for exchange of sounds over the  
mesh? Straight audiofile transfers via the Sugar shared spaces?

These are intial thoughts and questions.

Comments ?


jp (ethrop)