256A Reading Response #4
“Now” and time in the computer music programming language Chuck: a response to chapter 4 of Ge Wang’s Artful Design.
Chuck navigates time in a very interesting way. Unlike other languages which might be event-based, like the bang system of Max/MSP, or durational, like Csound and many others, Chuck asks you to contemplate the trickiness of “now” and encourages a different way to think about time.
The big “woah” moment for me came when I realized that sound and time are one and the same in Chuck. Since it is strongly-timed, digital audio samples are the basis of time, which is kind of trippy to think about. Let’s say there is a glitch and the audio stops, you’ll lose time outside of Chuck and maybe get some silence, but Chuck never lost time because it’s audio wasn’t being calculated. Granted Chuck is a programming language so a million different things could go wrong and break, but it’s cool to think of the unique ways they could go wrong in Chuck. I’m also not claiming to have exhaustive knowledge and saying that Chuck is the only language to do this. It’s just the first time I’ve dealt with it in such an overt way.
Music is the sequencing of events in time – sure, okay I feel like most folks have heard this and it sounds vague enough to not cause fights. But, much like an older tracker sequencer, you’ve gotta explicitly sequence in time. But not in any old. Oh no. You’ve got to ask the computer to CHUCK (which to me means to throw or pass) time to now. You’re not asking the computer to wait for a duration, but to literally pass time like a bottle of Siracha at a hipster flatbread place. I definitely don’t understand the mechanical differences between the two, but I enjoy the poetics of it. “Computer, wait for me” vs “computer, bend space-time for me”
But isn’t this klunky? Sure, like most things are depending on what you’re doing. But isn’t it annoying to worry about time to so much? It can be, but maybe we could all be a bit more intentional about time? Especially in something as explicitly durational as music. Maybe that’s why sitting through a performance can feel so much worse, why music can be a potentially violent space. It’s not just an aesthetic, but a temporal experience. You’re being subjected to someone else’s encoding of time. Not to say that’s any better or worse than a still visual medium like painting or sculpture, but it is very different.
Maybe that’s my main reaction to using time in Chuck. Is it better or worse? No idea, but it is different.