[sdiy] PolyDaWG/6 Code and Sound Sample Posted

[Eric Brombaugh]

Paul Maddox (Mail LIsts) wrote:

>> http://www.fpga.synth.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=FPGASynth.DigitalWaveguide
> 
> This is just superb

Yes!

> what I'm wondering now is, if there's a way to take
> something like ChucK (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/) and get it control an
> FPGA. Which would remove the need for 'beefy' machines to do performances.

I've played with Chuck a bit, and studied the source code a some as 
well. I'd guess that the answer depends on what you mean by 'control an 
FPGA'. While the simple response is probably 'yes' for all senses of the 
question, the long answer is more varied:

If you mean "Compile Chuck programs into an FPGA design, download and 
run them in real time", that's going to take a lot of coding that 
doesn't currently exist. It will also take a fairly powerful machine to 
do the translation from Chuck Program -> FPGA bitstream, which probably 
eliminates the advantages of running on a non-beefy machine.

If you mean "Create a flexible FPGA-based outboard processor and driver 
software that would allow Chuck (or any other PC-based program) to 
supervise remote sound generation", then that's closer to possible but 
would still need a fair amount of coding. You'd end up with something 
like an FPGA version of the Nord Modular.

An easier sense of the question might be "Use Chuck to select from a 
pre-compiled library of FPGA designs, download them to an S3Esk and 
control them in real time via MIDI". That you could probably do just by 
some minor modifications of the Chuck source and some clever scripting 
of the FPGA download tools.

The simplest case would be just doing MIDI control of one design. Chuck 
appears to have midiin and midiout keywords, so that may work as-is.

So many possibilities.

Eric