Moo song

I've decided that my midterm SuperCollider project will be a program that logs into the MOO (telnet xkey.com:3333) and interprets MOO text somehow into sounds. for this, I will need to create a $room, which will be called the Music Studio and a $player for my SuperCollider program to use. It would be better if the MOO and SuperCollider could communicate through some other means, besides a fake player. But I don't think MOO objects are allowed to make network connections and I can't think of another way to log in. (If you know otherwise, please let me know.)

anyway, the SuperCollider program will log into the MOO and from the text, create sounds. There's a few ways to do this. I could scan the text for particular key words, which would cause particular actions. for instance, the word "teleport" usually signifies that a new player has come in, and so when "teleport" comes across the network connection, some particular responce could occur. Or, I could do statistical analysis on the network text, changing the texture of the music based on the frequency and length of the received text. for instance, a lot of text arriving quickly would indicate that there's a lot of activity on the MOO and perhaps the program could respond by creating a dense texture of sounds. another thing that could happen is that $plays (and other objects) could have an optional "themes" property, which would contain information meaningful to the SuperCollider patch, so it could look at your theme property and, in Wagnerian style, play your theme while you are in the room.

If you have any suggestions or ideas about how you would musically represent MOO communications, you should pass them along. to be fair, the patch output will have t be streamed, so $players can listen. so think also of what musical noises might convey useful information. If you have a desk job and can sit with headphones on, would you like to hear it play something that tells you that somebody just logged on or one of your friends is talking?

One of the local guys is giving me and old PC with linux on it, so I can set up a test streaming server. Alas, it will probably not have a fixed IP address until it passes a certain amount of testing, since xkey must be stable. Or, Mitch could put a stable RedHat PC in the CN kitchen that could get nightly builds put up on it. The PC currently there is having some sort of disk problem.

This project probably wouldn't work well for Stony Brook, but that's ok. I have a final project after this one.