nbcli Research

nbcli is the name of this instrument, and the name given to the ongoing research from which it was born.

Meant for live coding, I became interested in accessing a variety of instruments while improvising, and became interested in harnessing a way to access many tools on my machine. This pointed me towards the command line and specifically the Bash language. As a research goal, I also wanted a tool for live coding visuals that was customized for live coding 3D geometry, and something to live code physical computing concoctions I might want to use. To me, this meant something to live code GPIO pins.

**Figure 2.** Scan from research: expressivity.

Putting these objectives together, nbcli amounted to two things:

a standalone application called sigv, built in Max
a configuration of Bash programs as utilities, commands, and terminal configurations.

**Figure 3.** Siamese Clocks, Orca code pattern that bounds clock operators.

**Figure 3.** Imagining the various ways I would need this instrument to accomodate performance and installation

Try it!

To project you into my world of using this tool, download and extract the standalone from itch.io, then run the nbcli install script which will install the following:

MIDI utilities
OSC message sending utility
QR code making utility
directory of Bash scripts
terminal configuration file

When ready, with your terminal open:

sigv

This should open the sigv standalone you downloaded and placed in the /Applications directory on your computer (I made this on macOS). If this did nothing for you, you may have extracted your downloaded application elsewhere, so you have two simple options:

(macOS users) Move sigv.app to the /Applications directory
Or, open this invisible file with a text editor: /nbcli/sigv (referring to the folder created by the install script).

This is what the code looks like when you open it:


        #!/bin/bash

        if [[ "$1" == "--config" ]]
        then
            nano $HOME/nbcli/.sigvsh
        elif [[ "$1" == "-b" ]]
        then
            cd $HOME/nbcli && ls
        else
            echo "Options: sigv --config [open .sigvsh configuration] -b [go to nbcli directory]"
            echo " "
            echo "sigv: an instrument and mini-language for transmodal live coding"
            echo "https://magfoto.itch.io/sigv"
            open /Applications/sigv.app
            cd "$HOME/nbcli/"
        fi

Line 14 shows

open /Applications/sigv.app

which you can change to the location of where you have your sigv.app file (or sigv.exe on Windows).

So now you can run

sigv

again and it should open a very small window (almost invisible) with a little square and a “quit” button.

Above that is an invisible textfield, mostly meant for backup use, as the commands you send are actually from the terminal window. Windows users who are having trouble with *nix (unix/linux flavor operating systems) running on their machine, you can omit the terminal and use that textfield to send sigv commands.

From your terminals, let’s add some commands:


        new wrld 0 0 wrld

A big window opens. Let’s change it’s size and precision:


        wrld size 400 400
        wrld dim 400 400

Much smaller window now. Now let’s load a primitive called geo:


        new geo 0 0 geo
        geo iso

You should see this...

If you do, congratulations! (phew)

To try some more examples, take a closer look at the commands! A work in progress.

- Marcus (@magfoto)