Meta-Benjolin

The Meta-Benjolin is a state- and timbre-based notation system and a meta-instrument, developed as a control structure for the Benjolin, a chaotic synthesizer.

Installing Dependencies

Python

Download the git repository as:

git clone https://github.com/vincenzomadaghiele/Meta-benjolin

In the terminal, run:

cd Meta-benjolin
conda env create -f benjo_environment.yml
conda activate benjo

Pure Data

Pure Data (PD) is an open source computer music environment, it can be downloaded here. The zexy library for PD is used for OSC communication between python and PD; The maxlib library is used for utils function. They can be installed by typing zexy and maxlib in the deken externals manager (Help -> find externals) and clicking on install.

Node.js

Node.js is a scripting language for developing server-side javascript applications. It can be downloaded here. Check node.js and npm (node package manager) version:

node -v
npm -v

Once downloaded, to install the required packages run:

cd node_server
npm install
cd ..
cd frontend
npm install

You are good to go! If there are problems in the installation, you can try to install dependencies separately by running:

cd frontend
npm install --save three 
npm install --save-dev vite

and:

cd node_server
npm i osc

Running the demo

To run the demo, we need three separate terminals to be open at the same time. These terminals will run, in parallel:

1. A python server, which communicates with PD through OSC protocol:

cd Latent-benjolin-interface
cd python_server
conda activate benjo
python3 latent_space_class.py

2. A node server, which relays messages from the browser to the python server:

cd Latent-benjolin-interface
cd node_server
node .

3. A Pure Data benjolin, which receives control parameters and synthesizes sound.

Open the patch pure-data-benjo-2024.pd.

4. A user interface, which sends controls to the benjolin.

cd Latent-benjolin-interface
cd frontend
npx vite