Alex McLean invited me to participate in the Kairotic intervention of the Heritage & Culture Hack in Sheffield on 10/01/2015. Amy Twigger Holroyd was also part of the group and we decided to try to turn knitting patterns into sound for great success. I wrote a small parser in SuperCollider that currently only parses the horseshoe lace from knitting bee correctly, which looks (manually split up into arrays for each row) like this:
[
"k1, *yo, k3, sl1, k2tog, psso, k3, yo, k1*",
"purl",
"k1, *k1, yo, k2, sl1, k2tog, psso, k2, yo, k2*",
"purl",
"k1, *k2, yo, k1, sl1, k2tog, psso, k1, yo, k3*",
"purl",
"k1, *k3, yo, sl1, k2tog, psso, yo, k4*",
"purl",
]
Amy successfully completed a round of the horseshoe lace as you can see in her tweet:
Thanks @uiae for writing code to translate knit pattern into instructional sounds. Tested w/ horseshoe & chevron lace pic.twitter.com/VG97epBNcH
— Amy Twigger Holroyd (@amykeepandshare) January 10, 2015
Here is the horseshoe lace repeated twice in each row, with text output of the knitting commands for illustration:
And here the whole thing sped up:
I put the source code in a gist.
For A Yorkshire Hack at the Digital Utopias Conference in Hull 20/01/2015 I started translating the parser into JavaScript to make a browser version, using web audio via Charlie Roberts’ Gibber.lib to sonify knitting patterns for knitters everywhere. More on this later.