Search for a command to run...
A new opera by Philippe Manoury, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) is loosely based on the very unperformable “play” (1915-1922) by Karl Kraus, written in reaction to the first world war. The first public performance was presented by the Opera of Cologne on June 27, 2025. Among the musical forces employed is a monstrous Pure Data (Pd) patch with about 1900 control parameters sequenced using Antescofo. Because of the size of the project, it was possible to devote nearly two years to the development of the electronic realization. From the beginning we decided to develop a continuous integration framework alongside the Pd patch itself to try to ensure the long-term stability of the realization. Using this framework we can sequence the patch automatically through several representative portions of the opera (or, if desired, the entire thing), verifying that, given a standard collection of live audio inputs and control actions, an exactly correct audio output is produced. This acts not only as a check against obsolescence of the Pd patch itself, but as a potent verification mechanism for the software components used, all of which are either open source or in the process of being released as such. As machine architectures and operating systems evolve in the future, it should be reasonably easy to maintain a verifiably correct realization of the electronic sounds used in the opera.