When I was five or six years old I had this Bugs Bunny read-a-long 7” storybook. Something about Bugs going to space with a rocket fuel made from carrots, of course. I don’t remember the story very well, but I do remember how magical the experience felt.

I remember lots of really awesome sound effects, and getting lost in my imagination looking at the illustrations on each page. Somehow that felt like a much more rich media experience than watching a cartoon on TV, which I assume by then I must have been doing, too.

The interactivity was simple, but still present: turning each page at the sound of the tone, flipping the record on my little Fisher Price turntable. It was an engaging way to tell a story.

Sometime in 2010 or 2011 I started working on Pippi – which at first was just a file called dsp.py that used the python standard library to do some basic cutup and granular tricks. It took a few iterations, but after a while I started to get into the idea of being able to publish a physical read-along score. I made some early experiments after developing Pippi enough (at that point I think I was calling it Fabric thanks to the suggestion of a friend) to make a standalone piece with it. One of those was called Amber, another called Pocket Suite, and another was called Williams, which was a re-write of an earlier pre-python piece written in ChucK.

I’ve kept doing these studies, working toward a stable API for Pippi that I could feel comfortable publishing in book form as a score.

The early idea was to try to tell the story through the score itself somehow, with the score also generating the layout for the book & inserting illustrations, etc. Each iteration unique. I’m not as hooked on the idea of the score being so present in the telling of the story, but I do still like the idea of publishing the full source code along with the book: everything needed to make new variations, or even something completely different if the reader feels inspired to do so.

What I’m still very much after capturing & expanding on is that experience I had with the Bugs Bunny read-along records: holding the book in your hand, having some control over the playback of the audio, and getting that magical (to me anyway) intermedia experience of reading and listening at once in the service of a single story.

I’m nearly 15 years into this journey, but the studies I’m doing now are starting to get a little closer to this. (Go here if you’d like to get them in the mail.)

I’ve been working on this all for so long I don’t even really think about the book project as such anymore, but libpippi is getting close enough to a point where I feel I’ll be able to remove the numpy-backed buffers from pippi and stamp the API as frozen on 2.0 soon enough. Which I guess is the thing that’s been keeping from considering going as far as publishing source code in print: I’d like it to be stable enough that years after publishing Pippi will still run the scores without issue, I guess.

There’s more to say, another time. I just started thinking about it all again I guess because I’m about to play music with some friends I haven’t seen since I started working on all this. Feels a bit nuts how long this project has dragged on, but satisfying to feel like I’m actually getting somewhere, slow as I’m moving.