#learningsc

[sounide]

Variables

Variables can store numbers, words, UGens, functions or entire patches

lower case a-z are default, ready declared environment variables

key word ‘var’ allows declaration of bespoke variables

their scope is local to function or block

~variableName allows creation of bespoke environment vars (global)

[sounide]

SC learning basics

I've been playing with Supercollider without reading the manual. I am just reading the manual now and am recording some revelations for personal use here.

Reading

Read from the middle (inner most function) out - nesting unpacks poetically

Evaluation

Evaluate Maths left to right: 10 + 5 * 4 = 60 !! (not 30)

Equivalence of Functional vs receiver notation:

functional: ("echo", 20) and rand(100)

receiver: ("echo".dup) 100.rand

So message ( arg ) == arg.message

and message ( arg1, arg2 ) == arg1.message( arg2 )

Style dictates when to use which.

UGens generally written as receiver.message (SinOsc.ar())

Receiver notation can string together messages, which can be more readable than high levels of nesting

{1000.0.rand.round(0.01).postln}.dup(100).postln.sort.plot

Enclosures

" Quotation marks " enclose a string of chars to create a string

' single quotes ' create symbols, as does a \backslash

'aSymbol' == \aSymbol (see String and Symbol help for more)

( parentheses ) enclose argument lists and force precedence

[ brackets ] define a collection of items - including Arrays which can mix data types and receive messages

{ braces } define functions

dup(random(1000.0), 3) // picks a number, duplicates it

dup({rand(1000.0)}, 3) // duplicates the rand function

== [ rand(1000.0), rand(1000.0), rand(1000.0) ]