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I will be out of town from Tuesday evening until sometime on Sunday. I’m driving back to Colorado with Madalene to hang out with my parents, and her parents. We leave on Tuesday evening, around 5pm, and hopefully will drive straight through. I’m a bit of a night owl, so I should be able to make the last stretch OK. If not, we’ll just lay the seats down and sleep for a little while.

While in Colorado, I have a lot of things to do, and not much time. See my grandma, eat Tofurky with my newly vegan brother, maybe go skiing, try to see Matt LeFrenchy, set up a Mac for Greg, do homework, and study for my C exam on Monday. Hmm. It will be busy, but good. It would be helpful if I had an iBook, because then I could do my programming homework on the road. Sadly though, I don’t own an iBook (someday though.. Someday..).

I’m currently writing an interesting program for Dennis and Company. It is a program that calculates interesting Pitch Class Sets. Give it a Pitch Class Set, and it will output the inverse set, the complementary set, the Normal Form Set, and the Prime Set Class! Why is this useful you ask? Well, I honestly don’t know. But, Dennis assures me that for Music Composition folks, its useful. I’ll just take his word for it. I’ve been reading about the transformations, and generating algorithms in C to make the transformations. I barely understand ‘why’, but the ‘how’ I’ve got a solid handle on. However, it gets more complex, and I’m at the end of my ability to figure it out on my own, so after I get back into town, I have to convince Dennis to sit down with me and teach me more.

The application currently has no real name, its just sort of called ‘set theory’ at the moment. It also has no offical version number, or documentation, but I’d call it version 0.1alpha if I had to give it a number. Its not even close to being releasable software in any sense of the word.

In the meantime, however, you can download and compile the source code and try out the application. It will compile in most unix systems, including Mac OS X. It is command line only at the moment. You will need to have the developers tools installed if you are doing it on OS X. Otherwise, gcc will work fine, I’ve tested it with gcc 2.95 on a SunOS system, and gcc 3.1 on a Mac OS X.2.2 system. Its reasonably simple, and doesn’t require any weird libraries, so most other ANSI C compilers will probably make sense of it, but no guarantees. The software has no license at the moment, but consider it GPL (which is what it will be released as when finished). Basically, steal the code if you want, but anything you make using the code has to be GPL as well.

Here is the process: Download the source tarball here.

Go into the terminal, or open a shell, and go to the directory you downloaded it to.

Use the command ‘gunzip settheory.tar.gz’ to unzip the file. Now use the command ‘tar -xvf settheory.tar’ to untar the file. Now a directory was created called ‘settheory’ use ‘cd settheory’ to get into that directory.

Here is the tricky part. Use the command ‘gcc settheory.c -o settheory’ to compile the program. If it fails here, or says ‘command not found’ you may not have the developers tools or gcc installed. Too bad, you can email me about it if you need help (though honestly, its not worth it, the program doesn’t do anything useful at all, I’m only posting this to give myself something to do. And maybe it will give you someone to do for a few minutes.) If it worked, you’ll now have a file called ‘settheory’ in the folder. Use the command ’./settheory’ (yes, thats a period then a forward slash, then the word ‘settheory’) to run the program. Enter a pitch class set. A pitch class set is between 3 and 9 numbers, each between 0 and 11. They stand for musical notes, like C, C#, D, D#, and so on. Put spaces between the numbers, and when you are done, hit enter, and you will magically see various other numbers appear, which have mathematical and musical relation to the numbers you entered. Boring huh? If you answered no to that question, you a probably Dennis! Look at the source code too if you want. They are just text files, some have more explanation on why its doing what its doing.

Now that you just wasted a few minutes of your time, go back to whatever it was that you were doing before I distracted you. Have a nice day!

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