You win the most in depth bio prize, it's nice to have an sense of
the people behind the emails, thanks for that. I don't think anyone
will object, but we need to wait the mandatory waiting period. After
a couple of days, feel free to nag me to add you if I forget.
.hc
On Dec 12, 2007, at 4:36 PM, Mike McGonagle wrote:
Hello all,
I just wanted to give a quick introduction of myself. My name is
Michael McGonagle, and my childhood nickname is "Mogo", a name that
has stuck with me as there are just too many damned Mike's in the
world.
My mother was a nurse and played the piano, her favorite thing to
play was "Clair de Lune" by Debussy. It was from here that I got my
love for music. We got a piano when I was about 12 and I would get
home every day after school and just play, teaching myself how to
both play the piano and composing simple tunes. I think I pissed
off my father for not just the amount of time that I played
(sometimes as much as 6 hours in the evenings), but also for the
fact that I liked to dismantle the piano, removing the covers so
that I could get access to the insides of the piano.
My first love in music was Beethoven. Next came Bach. It was a long
time before I was able to appreciate 20th century composition, but
since that time, I have learned what things I like and what I
don't... My list of favorite composers range from Stravinski,
Subotnick, Stockhausen, Webern, and many others. A professor that I
had in school got me interested in electronic/computer music. He
had built his own computer that did brain wave analysis (for a
doctor friend of his), and he also used it to create some very
rudimentary music.
I started programming back when the Comodore 64 was in its hey day.
Working in assembler was probably my favorite thing (the Assembler
program, while I don't remember the name of it, it was one of the
best programming packages I have ever used). I started to teach
myself C in about 1990, and found an interest in writing other
languages in C. I started off with a Forth interpreter, and used it
to create a very rudimentary composition package for myself. (That
was about 1992). I moved on to learn Java, and I tried to learn C++
(but there was just something about it that seemed perverse in
comparison with C, I will admit I LIKE POINTERS!). I think one of
the things that attracted me to Pure Data was the fact that it is
written in C, instead of C++.
As I work in Graphic Arts, I got interested in writing a PostScript
interpreter in Java. I would say that I still am working on it, but
it has been a couple of years since I have done anything with it.
It is a fully functional programming language, it just doesn't have
any of the graphics primitives that would make it PostScript.
I have been using Pure Data for about 5 years now, on and off. I
also have an interest in fractals, and specifically 'strange
attractor' types of equations. I had written some object classes to
deal with these sorts of functions, and when I found that Ben
Bogart had began a library called Chaos in Pure Data, I worked to
expand that library to not only include more attractor equations,
but also added the ability to search for other parameter sets that
would result in a chaotic stream (it wasn't perfect, but it worked
for some of the attractors).
I don't really compose much anymore for "real" instruments. My goal
is to set up some things in Pure Data that deal with granular
synthesis using Sine Wave generators (ala Stockhausen's Studie No
2), drive them using various fractal equations, genetic programming
techniques, or some other form of stochastic controls.
Currently, my most immediate goal in Pure Data is to create an SQL
front end that allows the storage of arbitrary data in a database.
Once that is "complete", I want to revamp all of my previous
projects to take advantage of using an SQL database to store
"compositions", etc. I have created a front-end for working with
Chaos, but as it doesn't have an easy way to store and recall
various parameters, I got frustrated in trying to release the code.
This is one thing I want to rework, as I think it will be useful to
others who are also interested in fractal generators.
Wow, sounds like a lot, and I guess it is for my 45 years on this
planet. I will say that it has been wonderful having access to not
just Pure Data, but the community that has built up around the
program.
Michael "Mogo" McGonagle
--
Peace may sound simple—one beautiful word— but it requires
everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream,
every high ideal.
—Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999), musician
_______________________________________________
PD-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-dev
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously. - Benjamin Franklin
_______________________________________________
PD-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-dev
