Before going down this pathway I had looked into Open Sound Control(OSC) as a means to have Pure Data communicate with Processing. I knew that due to Pure Data and Processing having different languages that it would be tedious to make(in the sense that I have to be really careful with wording in both programs), but out of everything that I’ve learnt over the weeks, this seems to be the easiest part.
From my understanding, the way in which OSC works is that you have to define the messages sent and received in the programs themselves as OSC is just a means of encoding information in a format that every program has support to understand. This means that I could theoretically have Processing send numerous amounts of messages to PD and then I could unpack and use all the different messages to trigger bangs that could be sent to different parts of the patch. The plan is for the randomisation to then be sorted on Processing’s side.
This idea of having only 1-way communication is similar to this image from the Floss manual.
However, as I have been researching Pure Data and OSC, a lot of the tutorials and information on the topic are outdated or in reference to PD Extended, an outdated offshoot of PD Vanilla. Even in the diagram above it has forward slashes which are redundant in newer versions of PD Vanilla.
Another big issue I’m having is that despite having the newest version of PD as well as the externals to use OSC properly, my Pure Data isn’t recognising a lot of the objects like sendOSC or receiveOSC.
Despite being very busy to the point where I’m planning a week-long workshop for high school students in my community, I’m actually decently ahead in my own timeline for this project and I do believe I’ll be up to iron out all the kinks in the end.