Rusty is a computer language for the representation of
musical ideas and the writing of musical programs.
An introductory paper (from the Proceedings of the
First Annual Symposium for Systems Research and Cybernetics in the Arts,
Baden-Baden, 1999) is available here in MS Word
and plain text formats. The entire
dissertation is available for download here in Postscript
(2.9Mb) and PDF (1.7 Mb) (viewable with Adobe
Acrobat Reader) formats, as well as two browsable versions (with less than
optimal handling of figures, equations, footnotes, etc.) here
and here. The old site at Cardiff is available
here,
including the "What is Rusty" page and pictures of the old demo.
The above materials describe the plan for the language in great detail. It now remains to code it but, as resources have been extremely meager, little progress has been made. This page will serve as the progress report, updated as progress occurs.
August 28, 2000---The first classes which must be coded are those which represent mathematical objects on which most musical objects depend. Principally these are one-dimensional functions. The class structure of this section has been altered somewhat from that described in the thesis, but it's still based on analytical combinations of complex functions represented as piecewise near-minimax polynomials on a partitioned domain. The interfaces DomainValued and Evaluable are complete as are the classes Domain and Subdomain. The class NearMinimax, which represents a near minimax polynomials and calculates the expanded Chebychev points, is very nearly complete. A survey of possible Rusty generators (a "Map of Parnassus") is underway, and may soon have its own webpage.
May 4, 2001---I have provided online versions of the thesis and the Baden-Baden paper in various formats. Work on the mathematical foundations continues slowly; I'm currently reviewing methods for regression (least-squares using optimal or given basis polynomials or trigonametric polynomials), various types of piecewise interpolation (splines, etc., as a method of function definition), etc.