If you’re interested in generative and algorithmic music – music that evolves organically rather than being pre-composed in start-to-finish linear fashion – you won’t want to miss this site. Nodal is a free (for non-commercial use) app for developing generative musical systems and transmitting MIDI. You’ll need a Mac (PowerPC/Intel) to run the software, but even if you’re on Windows or Linux, you’ll find a number of interesting research papers on the site. vinayk writes:

The program is called Nodal – osx only, BEAUTIFUL interface, and FREE, it does a bit more sophisticated things but I basically plugged the output into sculpture – and it sounded amazing… well worth a look! And if anyone can tell me how to sync this to live or logic then i’d be much obliged!

Since it sends MIDI, it’d also be interesting to use this hooked up to visuals or triggering clips in Ableton Live.

Nodal Project Page, Tutorials, Examples, Research [Monash University]

I’ll be giving this a try soon. If you know of other generative software and research we should be checking out, perhaps we can put together a full round-up.

See also Noatikl / Mixtikl, from Intermorphic – developers who built the ground-breaking Koan generative system for Brian Eno. And we’re getting close to the release of the game Spore, which will feature a new generative engine and Eno’s composition.

noatikl: New Generative Music Engine, So You Can Rock Out Like Eno

Generative iPod? Deep Modular, Generative Music System Bound for iPhone, Phones, Windows, Mac

(Note that we learned this week that Mixtikl is not coming to iPhone in the immediate future. It’s available on plenty of other platforms, however, and if you’ve got a Mac for both, let the generative music making commence!)

Here’s a blast from the past — an algorithmic compositional blast from the past, that is. M is a unique piece of software for “interactive composition.” With patterns, cycles, and conducting options, you can create algorithmically-generated music, adjusting various parameters for sophisticated results rather than sequencing directly. It’s a totally different approach to working, something that’s easier to experience than to describe. M launched way back in 1987 and eventually support Atari, Amiga, Mac, and Windows; it was a big hit in the years afterward. The creators were David Zicarelli (now with Cycling ‘74, and a sort of father to Cycling’s Max/MSP), John Offenhartz, Antony Widoff, and Joel Chadabe. (Check out the whole history.) I saw it for the first time at a summer program at Oberlin and loved it immediately. Now, with a computer stacked full of soft synths and the recurring desire to get out of my head, compositionally, I think I actually have more use for it in 2007.

It’s not very often that vintage software gets update
d with current tech while retaining its original interface, but that’s exactly what Cycling ‘74 has done with M 2.7. Intel compatibility means it can run on your brand-new Mac Pro, but the angular throwback interface will make it look like a Mac II. (Got a good System 7 skin, anyone?) But the real story here is Core MIDI support. It allows you to plug M into your existing soft synths. Imagine M plus Logic’s Sculpture, or combined with a monster Max/MSP patch.

M 2.7 @ Cycling ‘74

It’s great to see someone recognize that it’s not only about the upgrade that’s just around the corner. Virtual Console games are selling by the millions on Nintendo’s Wii. Hopefully creative technology, even in limited form, could be next. I’ll be testing M soon; I’ll let you know how it goes.

PC users/Atari lovers: See details in comments on the freeware Atari version. But what’s this about an emulator? Time to scour eBay for an Atari ST, I think.

Generative music is, of course, of great interest to game composition, because it makes the musical score as dynamic and unpredictable as the game itself, rather than simply a background of looping music. Whereas some composers are actually looking to more complex recorded scores, others are coming full circle to music more tightly tied to the game.

It’s great to see Eno and Wright return to the simplest of models as a conversation. I’m eager to learn more about the music specifically being composed — or engineered, depending on how you look at it — for Spore, and hope we can bring you more details closer to the release.

Thanks to Synthtopia for pointing this out; they’ve got additional videos with more coverage of Spore itself:

Will Wright and Brian Eno On Spore [Synthtopia]

Lots of other great stuff has been hitting Synthtopia of late, as well, so do check it out!

In other Eno-mania news, Apple has a profile of Eno as visualist, and his new digital painting project 77 Million Paintings. The model in visualism as in music is generative, working with seeds.

Profiles – Brian Eno [Apple.com]

77 Million Paintings [Official Project Page]

77 Million Paintings Interview [YouTube]

Eno’s background was in art, so it’s nice seeing the fusion of music and visuals — something we’re all about.

Anyone else with some good Eno stuff, Spore or otherwise, send them our way!

The Musini began its life as an award-winning toy. The product description is hilarious:

A perfect gift for rambunctious toddlers, the Musini music box provides a constructive way for children to channel their physical and creative energy. While kids step, jump, turn, and tap, the Musini’s patented MusicSensor detects their every move and translates it into a totally unique musical response, teaching cause and effect. A Style Dial encourages children to explore the five different musical styles, ranging from jazz to classical, and musical variation buttons offer four different interpretations of each musical style.

(Some of us rambunctious toddlers here on CDM require decidedly more expensive toys into which we channel our physical and creative energy.)

Of course, the results are interesting, but not as interesting as they could be, so circuit benders have set about modifying the toys. A couple of weeks ago, we saw chronovalve’s ambient musini bend, alongside a very lovely, post-apocalyptic-looking keyboard. Jonathan Williams write in to share his own circuit-bent musinis. His designs may have inspired other benders’ musini hacks; even if not, he’s gone through several generations and added some powerful features:

1. “Military-spec” glitch/drone switches (my friends wish they could affix one of these to my skull)
2. Photocell opto-theremin for light-sensitive, touchless pitch control (as with any photocell, this opens up the possibility of using lights for modulation, etc.)
3. Pitch control knobs for up or down sweeps
4. Coming soon: ribbon controller

Here’s what it sounds like:
http://www.circuitbends.com/musiniMKIII.mp3

Jonathan notes he’s been doing this a year, before (to his knowledge) any Musini bends were yet visible:

It seems that once mine appeared it inspired quite a bit of activity with these things. People who had given up on them went back to look again as there was proof of great bends, and many others went out and found them to try bending. Slowly, other people’s versions have started to appear on the web.

There are some features on Jonathan’s bend that don’t appear to be on others, so we’ll give him some bragging rights for sure. He promises a new site soon called Circuitbends.com, which we’ll feature one it goes live. In the meantime, you can see more of his Musini on this archived eBay site:

CIRCUIT BENT MUSINI…DRONE/LOOP/CHANCE MUSIC GENERATOR

Mike aka Chronovalve writes CDM to share two new projects: a circuit-bent keyboard called Debris and the Musini, a children’s toy turned into a surprisingly sophisticated ambient music generator.

Here’s the surprise: just because these are circuit-bent / DIY projects doesn’t have to mean they sound like glitchy chaos. One of the conversations I had with Reed Ghazala, the “father of bending”, was about his disappointment that benders weren’t exploring broader timbral and musical horizons, at least for his taste. Mike definitely gets some interesting sounds out of these. For instance, the keyboard can absolutely rock the glitch:

Debris Glitch

But it can also enter traditional synth lead territory, with some subtle twists:

Debris 1

The Musini enters an entirely different musical dimension with some wild sonic landscapes, all from an aleatoric children’s toy:

Musini Metamorph

More pics and sounds:

Musini
Debris

Nat has made a video, as well, in which you can watch him convert bubble gum-on-platform music to Sibelius digital notation. It’s the ultimate digital music, in a way: the analog (erm, disgusting old bubble gum) is overlaid on a real-world grid (the lines of the platform) and quantized to 5-line staff notation.

Full details from Nat:

Aleatoric Music Composition [onetonnemusic]
Aleatoric Composition… THE MOVIE! [onetonnemusic]

Composers out there, if you’ve ever done anything similar, we’d love to hear about it.

Programming offers incredible possibilities for music creation, and with the free Processing development environment for Mac, Windows, and Linux, even non-programmers can get into the artistic horizons of code. But code doesn’t always think like composers do. That’s why the new sound library jm-Etude looks promising:

New sound library: jm-Etude [Code & form]

jm-Etude for Processing, and the Java library jMusic on which it’s based, allow you to structure your code more musically with notes, phrases, parts, and scores. Combine this with the Sonia synthesis library for Processing (or, for Java development, the corresponding JSyn plug-in), and you have a serious compositional environment. I can also see this as appealing to people coming from the land of Csound and wanting something that lets them code notes and other musically-useful units.

I’d love to see a similar library that helps deal with performance environments, helping structure into scenes and elements — Chris from Pixelsumo was just asking me how you might use Processing in a VJ performance. For live music or visuals, it’d be helpful to have a library that lets you structure what you’re doing over time for performance. Anyone know if there’s something like this already out there (short of coding the thing yourself, which might ultimately be better)?

[Updated:] I missed the major point of this, which is that it lets you use Processing as an interactive MIDI sequencer. (Follow that link for a promising-looking interactive table, built in the “app no one wants to use any more,” Director.)

Brent, CDM’s resident game composer, is back with another look at the world of digital music in gaming. And again, gaming gives us a glimpse of what future digital music could be like — namely, permutable. (That’s a word, isn’t it?) -PK

The level of interactivity in today’s game audio continues to grow and expand. While most of us are used to the experience of a specific theme or piece of music associated with a given level or area in a game (e.g. the level 1-1 “Overworld Theme” from Super Mario Bros.), only recently have game composers been afforded the storage space and system-level-support for music that changes based on the (sometimes unpredictable) actions of the player.

A growing trend on this front is what is known as permutative music. Though certain developers may call it by different names, this type of audio implementation essentially remixes the audio tracks on-the-fly based on the actions of the player. The newest version of Splinter Cell, features a very well implemented system of this nature, with a soundtrack composed by electronic virtuoso Amon Tobin.

(Read more)

The soundtrack is now available via the iTunes Music Store, as well as Amazon and perhaps your local music store. Tobin is, after all, one of the underground’s most beloved electronic musicians. What is interesting is that the soundtrack, while certainly able to stand on its own in album format, is distinctly more complex and involved in-game. Gamespot has a great Q&A session with Tobin from earlier this year. It discusses his inspirations and his composition process, but here’s a quick breakdown of what makes the music in Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory unique.

Realizing that the album version of the soundtrack was arranged after the actual composition of the in-game tracks, it is easiest to think of each tune in the sense of its component parts. This is an easy concept to grasp if you’re used to working in a multitracking app such as Logic, Sonar or Live. For each completed song, Tobin has what he calls four “levels” of intensity. In its simplest terms, musicians might think of this as a bass track, a drum track, a pad track and a lead track. The game’s audio engine adds and subtracts layers based on the actions of the player, such that the intensity of the background music will increase as the stress level or action of the player increases. For example, setting off an alarm or being spotted by a security guard will immediately raise the intensity level, and the music will intensify accordingly. Thus, the music becomes much more intimately tied to the actions of the player.

These types of changes aren’t easily described verbally, nor is the depth and complexity of the in-game score properly reflected in the (static) album version of the game’s soundtrack. But performing musicians are certainly familar with the concepts at work here. Ableton Live’s ’session’ interface, for example, provides a nearly ideal method of testing out this type of ‘permutative’ development, allowing you to mute/unmute, solo, and bring tracks, loops and samples in on the fly. It certainly makes the case for how useful this application (or those like it) might be in a game-scoring scenario.

Do you use concepts like permutation in your compsitions? What tools work well for you? This is clearly a growing trend – both for interactive games and interactive audio as a whole – so we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

I get these kind of requests all the time. "Peter, thanks for the
helpful coverage on the USB MIDI controllers, but when will someone finally release audio hardware I can really use, like a concrete block that plays algorithmic music for 30 years?"

Yes, folks: it's a piece of concrete.
With a DSP chip inside. That can randomly generate algorithmic music
for 30 years (after which, it dies . . . unless it's robot soul goes
insane thinking about its own mortality, a la Blade Runner). Good news
for DIY types, though: the Boston-based DSP collective that created
this is working on a new cheap DSP box anyone can use. Encase it
concrete if you like, or (more useful) use it in your own installation
or performance rig. More on that soon. [Thanks, eyebeam]