Benthos

    Being a Mac-OS X user, I have never been too fond of Apple's Finder application. Unfortunately, the search for alternative applications did not come up with a totally satisfying result either. Thus, I decided to develop a file manager application myself and called the project Benthos.

    Over the years, I especially liked to work with file manager that follow the principles of the Norton Commander: the Total Commander on Windows and Krusader on Linux; the 2-panel principle to me has proven to be fast and efficient. Accordingly, Benthos will adopt that principle and develop it further.

    Just like coJIVE, Benthos is also a Cocoa application currently under development. I still have to decide whether to declare this project to be Open Source Software.

coJIVE

coJIVE (collaborative Jazz Improvisation Environment) is a joint project of my colleague Jonathan Klein and myself that we created in the course of our diploma theses. The system's purpose is to enable musically inexperienced people to participate in jazz sessions and create aestethically pleasing improvisations. Jazz musicians often improvise during their solos by creating new melodies 'on the fly'.

While Jonathan was concerned with the implementation of music theory in the system, my part of the project focused on the interaction with users. The system provides a basic accompaniment (i.e., bass & drums), which is automatically generated based on the chosen song - users can choose from a set of well-known jazz standards. coJIVE also creates a structure for the session, and tries to co-ordinate the collaboration of the users. In addition, the seeks to substitute for the users' lack of knowledge and experience regarding musical theory and handling the given instruments - a keyboard and a set of batons are provided with the system - through systematic support, which can be adjusted to each user's individual abilities.

coJIVE was developed in the form of a Cocoa application (interaction & session control) and a Mac OS framework (implementation of musical theory) in Mac OS X. The system uses Apple's CoreMIDI interface for communicating with the instruments and for audio output.

waveXpose

My first experiment in handling digital audio data; to familiarise myself with the structure of WAV files, I wrote this command line tool. It first reads a file, interprets its contents, and then displays the most important facts: the format of the audio data, bits per sample, sampling rate, and length in seconds.