Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists

Appendix C. Unit generators

You’ve used many unit generators throughout this book, but we didn’t touch on all of them or on all of the things that UGens can do. This appendix lists all current ChucK UGens and the methods and variables available for you to access in using them.

In general, UGens deal with audio on a per-sample basis. This means that in a UGen connection such as

adc => Gain myGain => dac;

at each point, dac asks myGain for a sample, which in turn asks adc for a sample. The adc passes the most recent sample to myGain, which then scales it according to the set gain; then passes it to dac for output. Audio samples in ChucK have a nominal range of -1.0 to 1.0. They’re floats and can be any value, but before they reach the dac or