This chapter covers
- Events: a different way to advance time
- Controlling ChucK in real time from your computer keyboard
- Inter-shred communication using events
- Broadcast events vs. notify events
- Creating your own event classes by subclassing
You’ve explored many topics and gained many skills throughout the book so far, including using logic, arrays, functions, multithreading, classes, and objects. If you’ve never programmed before, you can now look at almost any other language and be able to jump in and start understanding the basics right away.
One last step for you is to learn some new tools for live performance, so that you can take your compositions on stage as well as talk to other systems in the studio. You’re going learn two ways of doing this: using the keyboard and mouse in this chapter and using MIDI controllers and Open Sound Control (OSC) in chapter 11. In the process of learning these new techniques and skills, you first need to learn about a new concept called events, which provide a means for shreds to talk to each other in real time and also a means for you to receive signals and information from the outside world.