ChucK

Strongly-timed, Concurrent, and On-the-fly Music Programming Language

Welcome to ChucK!

what is it? : ChucK is a programming language for real-time sound synthesis and music creation. It is open-source and freely available on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a unique time-based, concurrent programming model that's precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly. In addition, ChucK supports MIDI, OpenSoundControl, HID device, and multi-channel audio. It's fun and easy to learn, and offers composers, researchers, and performers a powerful programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis/analysis programs, and real-time interactive music.

For more information, including documentation, research publications, and community resources, please check out the ChucK website: http://chuck.stanford.edu/

JavaScript

ChucK has a JavaScript port, generated by the conversion tool Emscripten. The JavaScript version consists of a single file, chuck.js, which is generated by the make target 'emscripten'.

This library requires Web Audio API to function, so be sure to combine it with a compliant browser. We have a test HTML page to demonstrate chuck.js, src/emscripten/chuck.html; just open this in a Web Audio enabled browser, and you should hear a short sine tone.

BUILDING

If you wish to build for debugging, make sure you export the environment variable CHUCK_DEBUG equal to 1 (export CHUCK_DEBUG=1) before building. This will disable optimization and enable debug symbols. It will also make the the JavaScript version of ChucK easier to work with, due to not being optimized.

JavaScript

To build the JavaScript port of ChucK, you should use the Gradle build tool. Since a wrapper is included with ChucK, you'll only need to make sure the Java runtime (JRE) is installed first. Then, you must install Emscripten and make sure it's activated in your shell by sourcing the Emscripten SDK. On OS X I accomplish this with the following command: pushd ~/Applications/emsdk_portable/ && source ./emsdk_env.sh && popd. Now, from the root directory run ./gradlew emscripten. This will generate a JavaScript library with the help of Emscripten: 'build/js/chuck.js'.

JavaScript Demos

To build the JavaScript demo HTML pages, first make sure you have NPM installed. Also, install grunt (npm install -g grunt-cli) if you don't have it. Then, enter the js directory, and if you haven't done so already, run npm install to install the JavaScript dependencies.

To build the demo pages, in js/examples/, enter the js/ directory and execute grunt. This'll build a number of standalone HTML pages in the js/examples/ directory, each of which you can open to see/hear a certain demo of ChucK.

It is recommended to launch the demo pages via a Web server, this is actually required if chuck.js has been built with optimizations, for technical reasons. If you've got Python installed, you can start a Web server as simple as this: python -m SimpleHTTPServer.