In the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, one of the characters has created a spreadsheet that sets data to music. Thanks to Songsmith, we’re more or less there now.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft realizes that the best use for their new toy is as a chart type in Excel.

Microsoft recently released Songsmith, software that takes a vocal performance and generates a musical score.

The original intention, as I understand it, was to give singers (or people who fancied themselves as such) an easy way to put some music around their songs. Ah, but the law of unintended consequences had other ideas.

What Microsoft has done is opened a rift between our universe and some sort of parallel universe where all the songs we know were actually a collaboration between a songwriter and a bunch of mediocre musicians with Casio synths. A part of me is afraid that this rift will eventually annihilate our own universe. The only way to stop the onslaught is by embracing a new, un-Songsmithable aesthetic.

But I don’t know if I want it to end. I’m really enjoying going to YouTube every day and finding new songs. And as someone with at least a passing interest in the intersection of computers and the arts, I’m at least sort of impressed with what Microsoft has done technologically.

As a final thought, I hypothesize that there is some sort of identity relationship between MIA and Songsmith, whereby feeding Songsmith an MIA song will actually produce the same song.

Or maybe, just maybe, the awesomeness is amplified into this:

I want to play around with ARToolKit. My plan is to take the pattern detection information and ship it off to places for further processing. I figured the easiest way to do that would be to use Open Sound Control. Since ARToolKit is a C framework, I though it would make sense to use an OSC library written in C. oscpack looked like a good candidate.

I’m using a Intel-based Mac. To build and install the oscpack library I needed make a few changes to the Makefile. I thought I would share these changes in case anybody else tries to do this.

Step zero is ONLY NECESSARY IF YOU ARE RUNNING ON A POWER PC-BASED MAC. Sorry to shout, I just want to emphasize this. I didn’t need to do this, but I’m pointing it out anyway in case it helps somebody. At the beginning of the Makefile, change

ENDIANESS=OSC_HOST_LITTLE_ENDIAN

to

ENDIANESS=OSC_HOST_BIG_ENDIAN


This next step, step one, is only necessary if you don’t want to create (or have not already created) a /usr/local directory. It doesn’t exist by default, and if it isn’t there then the installation process will fail. You need to change

PREFIX = /usr/local

to

PREFIX = /usr


The thrid step involves using the right compiler syntax to set up a shared library. Change this part of the code

@#GNU/Linux case
$(CXX) -shared -Wl,-soname,$(LIBSONAME) -o $(LIBFILENAME) $(LIBOBJECTS) -lc
@#Mac OS X case
@#$(CXX) -dynamiclib -Wl,-install_name,$(LIBSONAME) -o $(LIBFILENAME) $(LIBOBJECTS) -lc

to

@#GNU/Linux case
@#$(CXX) -shared -Wl,-soname,$(LIBSONAME) -o $(LIBFILENAME) $(LIBOBJECTS) -lc
@#Mac OS X case
$(CXX) -dynamiclib -Wl,-install_name,$(LIBSONAME) -o $(LIBFILENAME) $(LIBOBJECTS) -lc


Now you can run sudo make install and the libraries and headers will be installed on your system. Awesome! Now try to build one of the examples, like examples/SimpleSend.cpp. Don’t forget to point to the include files (-I) and the shared library (-l).

cd examples
g++ I/usr/lib/oscpack -loscpack -o SimpleSend SimpleSend.cpp

Now if you listen to port 7000 and run the program you should see the message.