Dreaming of a future in which music, instead of just being rendered audio files, arrives in fully generative, interactive form? Albums might “listen” to the world around you, and listeners could record their own alternate versions of music and share with others.

RjDj, the generative mobile music platform for Apple devices, realizes that future right now, instead of at some nebulous time in the future. In addition to the iPhone, you can make use of a second-generation iPod to use it. (You’ll need a headset with a mic; I have one by Griffin I’m testing.) And the RjDj folks have a whole bevy of significant updates to share:

• Free downloads (limited time): All three RjDj releases are available now for free. That includes the RjDj app itself (from which you can now grab and share releases), as well as RjDj Album (with a selection of generative/interactive/reactive releases) and the new RjDj shake.
• Download “scenes”: From the beginning, we knew that RjDj was imagined as a platform for other people to release interactive music. Now you can download scenes for free or fee. (Paid scenes currently redirect to the browser, but with iPhone SDK 3.0, you’ll be able to buy right from the app.)
• Share recordings: Because RjDj-generated music is controlled by the user and often records from the environment, the music may sound different each time. You can now share recordings with others from the device and the new social site.
• RjDj.me community: The RjDj folks have built a little community where you can share your favorite scenes and upload recordings, and keep track of scenes coming out from other artists.

By the way, with all of these releases, I know there’s some confusion. RjDj is the main app — the platform from which you’ll be able to grab scenes in the future. RjDj Album is a collection of “player”-style RjDj scenes — ones we have seen released previously. RjDj Shake is a newer, accelerometer-powered set of scenes. It comes with the amusing admonition that you should “PLEASE TAKE CARE, DON’T HURT ANYONE AND DON’T SMASH YOUR DEVICE.” If you missed Shake before, it now also has the recording sharing features. But the main RjDj app is the big release going forward.

We’re also awaiting news on more “sprints,” community-driven development efforts for making new scenes. And if you’re a fan of this sort of thing, RjDj isn’t the only game in town. RjDj itself is powered on Pure Data, the open source patching cousin of Max/MSP. Pd is making its way to other mobile devices; I even have it working on the BUG Labs gadget. At the same time, I’m curious to see if the RjDj gang can succeed in building a platform for lots of people doing this sort of work.

Regardless of how you look at it, more mobile generative / responsive music is most definitely in your future. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere:
Free trip into the rainbow vein: reality-enhancing iPhone app RjDj free with social update [Boing Boing Offworld]

RjDj.me community site
RjDj 0.7 out now [RjDj News]

RjDj [iTunes]
RjDj Album [iTunes]
RjDj Shake [iTunes]

Be sure to see our previous interview with the creators:
Exclusive RjDj Interview: Interactive Music Listening, Everywhere You Go

Also, expect more iPod/iPhone news and hands-on’s soon — I’m way behind, but let’s assume that means the best stuff will rise to the top.

As an addendum to the last story, Ivica Ico Bukvic sends along an example of the [myu] Max/MSP + Unity game engine combination in action. Here’s the surprise: Unity isn’t generating visuals. Instead, Unity simulates ripples created by movement in the space, and builds physical models that are sonified and spatialized by Max/MSP.

Speaking of work involving art museums and the combination of Max and Unity, VJ Anomolee notes in comments his own work with the pairing. Lightbent Synth is an in-progress piece with alternative controllers and sensors that produces sound with a novel visual representation (sound’s very quiet in this preview — more hopefully once it progresses):

Lightbent Synth from VJ Anomolee on Vimeo.

Ivica explains the top work:

This past fall [myu] had seen its first real-world implementation in an exhibit that was a part of the grand opening of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA (http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/). The exhibit utilized [myu] as part of an interactive aural installation titled "elemental." An online tech
demo video of the installation, including written synopsis is available also via Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA-9BOgc1gk. Below is a brief synopsis of the installation:

"elemental" interactive communal soundscape premiered in November 2008 as part of the Revo:oveR collection commissioned for the grand opening of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA. The Youtube video focuses primarily on the technical aspects of the installation. Using Max/MSP/Jitter, a homebrew IR webcam with fish eye lens and a LED-based IR spotlights, entire 24×36-foot exhibit space is converted into an aural sandbox giving visitors an opportunity to generate and shape the
ensuing soundscape. Positional data of up to 20 visitors is forwarded to Unity3d using [myu] Max-Unity interoperability toolkit developed at DISIS (http://disis.music.vt.edu). Unity is used for physical simulation of ensuing ripples and the resulting data is sent back to Max for spatialization across a 12-channel (4×3) ceiling-mounted speaker array. Driven by communal interaction, virtual ripples refract from each other spawning an algorithmically generated aural fireworks. The exhibit ran non-stop for approximately 5 months until March 2009.

Bonus video below: an early prototype that did include visuals. After days of looking at emulated knobs and faders, it certainly does speak to some of the possibilities for musical interface and expression.

Sequencers by definition traditionally lock musical patterns into repetitive, unchanging blocks of time. But a new generation of generative sequencers can instead form organic patterns that change and transform.

Nodal is a totally free-as-in-beer (closed-source) sequencer for composing music. (A license is needed for commercial use.) As the name implies, it uses a matrix of nodes to represent musical structure. The best way to understand what that means exactly is to check out the examples and give the app a shot, but is good fun – and capable of creating some lovely, unusual musical textures.

The good news now is that if you’re on Windows XP/Vista, you’re no longer left out of the fun: the app now runs Universal on Mac and on Windows, as well.

Aside from Windows support, also new in version 1.1:

• New, more polished UI
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Internal MIDI synth support on Windows

It does sound as though Nodal may not remain free-as-in-beer, but with some significant updates coming later this year will move into the cheap-as-in-beer territory. Stay tuned.

Composer and co-developer Peter Mcilwain sends along the video here with a live improvisation made in the software. It’s a bit Minimalist-influenced, but shows how you can use Nodal to drive some musical inspiration. Peter also explains just what Nodal means musically to him and the small but growing collection of users taking advantage of Nodal’s paradigm:

Interest in Nodal probably centres around the fact that the software enables sophisticated, or “deep”, generative approaches within an intuitive graphical user interface that is simple and easy to use. Many users say that the program can be learnt within a short space of time and that is fun, inspiring and is fascinating to use. Once a little experience is gained people come to recognize the rich possibilities that the network approach gives them. Nodal offers a wealth of compositional possibilities that enable users to explore transformations of musical ideas quickly and easily.

Much music has been made using processes such as looping. Nodal does this too, but with a number significant additions. For example, it is possible to have loops within loops. The musical diversity that is possible takes Nodal beyond from the concept of a loop into a territory that is more like creating maps of musical pathways with which musical possibilities can be navigated. Musical materials can be played forwards and backwards, recombined or played with different rhythms. All of these transformations can happen in real-time making it a rich tool for computer assisted improvisation.
In fact working with Nodal can be very similar to more traditional composition processes. Here a small musical cell might be created which is then developed, elaborated or transformed into new material. Seen in this way, composing does not necessarily involve making a string of new ideas but instead it is the exploration of different aspects of a single idea. By limiting a composition to a small number of ideas the music maintains coherence and a sense of unity. While composers have done this manually, and in some cases masterfully, Nodal enables the transformation of idea to be automated and extended to transformational processes that would be very difficult to achieve with pen and paper.

Nodal: Generative Music Software

Previously:

Nodal: Generative Music Software for Mac (Free for Non-Commercial Use)

Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing

Alternative Sequencers: Elysium Generative Mac App and the Joy of Hex

A Mutating Drum Step Sequencer, New MIDI Library for Processing

Fractals, those wacky self-similar, rough geometries that resemble so many patterns in nature, were once all the rage. Ravers and digital artists embraced them, only to get bored with them, apparently. To billions of years of evolution and natural phenomena, they’re still cool. And to me, there’s still plenty to talk about when it comes to thinking how fractals might be all the rage.

Composer Terran Olson, a musician with a long resume that includes work with the Ives Quartet and Quartet San Francisco, takes on the idea of fractals in a new article. Writing for our friends at Rain Pro – makers of music and visual pro PC laptops – Terran explores how fractal patterns could be applied to sound.

Exploring Audio Fractals

The results are fascinating: they’re a kind of fractal synthesis. Of course, that gets at the heart of the question: just how do you map a visual pattern like a fractal – or anything else visual – to music? The answers aren’t always intuitive. The biggest question is whether to work at the scale of sound (Terran focuses on individual samples and impulses), or to deal with musical patterns. I knew I had read a fractal article in Electronic Musician; sure enough, in 1999 EM did a story on fractals that focused instead on pitch mappings. (Bonus: Bach even comes up.)

Fractals and Music

Composer Gustavo Diaz-Jerez penned that story, and the results tend toward algorithmic music. Many of the tools are now gone, though some survive (Csound) and other tools (Max/MSP, Pd, SuperCollider, Reaktor, ChucK) could certainly fill in.

And, of course, for a truly high-level musical approach to fractals, skip the individual sounds or individual notes and write a whole song, like Jonathan Coulton’s brilliant fractal ode, “Mandelbrot Set.” (It should also help anyone needing to, erm, brush up on their fractal theory.)

Sadly, neither of these articles is especially useful as how-to – great on theory, but not so practical if you haven’t tried these things before. That begs for a new tutorial. Are you working with fractals these days? I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

I hesitate to share this, because a) YouTube numbers suggest you may have seen it already and b) it’s pretty depressing. On the other hand, it’s not like the fact the economy is depressing is news, exactly, so I suggest we employ the time-tested coping method that is laughter. Thanks (?) to Paul Norheim for this.

It also suggests a pleasing solution: the world economy just has the pitch control set wrong! Just start that turntable up again.

Or, more disturbingly, the fall of the economy is all part of some deep Schenkerian urlinie, a global capitalistic descent to the tonic. (What? No one up for some Friday afternoon theory humor?)

And yes, with apologies to the very-talented Microsoft Songsmith team, your product is becoming the new Hitler meme.

That’s it. We’re out for the weekend. I got nothin’.

Composing music is not unlike programming – and either, at their best, can be expressive. In the early days of IT (before “IT” was even a term), many computer programmers came from a musical background. (And even early in the computer age, there was more call for software than symphonies – and more pay.)

But what if you could program music easily, using musical syntax in a programming language? That’s the question asked by languages like Velato. The commands actually aren’t as esoteric as you might expect; they include references to standard pitch and commands like “Change root note.” The language expresses notes, mapped to the alphabet, a bit like teaching the computer solfege. Using additional expressions, you can transform notes and generate musical materials.

The results sound a bit like an academic-sounding ragtime. And yes, they do sound as though they were generated by a computer. (Have a listen to a .MID file.)

For more on Velato:
Velato wiki page @ Esoteric Languages
A compiler built in .NET (Windows-only, though if you really wanted to I imagine you could quickly port to Mono or other environments)
An introduction [Rottytooth blog]

Creator Rottytooth is Daniel Temkin of New York. Along the same lines is Fugue, which specifies notes as intervals (oddly, the same way I learned atonal sightsinging, but that’s another story).

So, what use is all of this? Creating languages for music could be a first step to being able to write compositionally-useful generative music algorithms. That could allow composers writing for games, installations, performance, or software to create interactive music that generates itself without sounding like a bunch of random notes. And having an elegant, musical language to do so could allow you to sketch ideas with just a few keystrokes.

In fact, I’d argue that sitting with a big, monolithic music editor, you might actually spend more time and effort than a reduced language, once you learn it. I’m not sure these are mature enough to use yet, but the idea is fascinating. And who knows, maybe you’ll someday see this as a scripting option in the sequencer you already use.

Previously:
Code Your Own Sequencer? Archaeopteryx Generates MIDI with Ruby

Thanks to Grant Michaels, via Twitter, for the tip. (Grant’s Twitter feed includes lots of other goodies, too.)

Musicians and composers have long dreamt of computers and mobiles playing music that changes on its own, rather than playing static, pre-determined scores. But to actually pull it off, you need a number of pieces. One solution for putting those pieces together is finally here, with desktop-to-mobile delivery and an interesting combination of a generative engine with synths and effects that can work in real time.

We’ve been following the work of Intermorphic for some time: this team, experienced in generative music (as popularized by the likes of Brian Eno), has been building a portfolio of software for music making using generative and other techniques. At long last, their anticipated Mixtikl V1 suite is here. The idea is to combine a set of complementary tools for making and delivering music on computers and mobiles, with a particular eye toward interactive, generative tools. The components of the suite:

• Partikl, the synth: Modular synth, DLS (DownLoadable Sound) MIDI playback, and effects “network,” Partikl works both on desktops and on mobile devices (currently PocketPC/PDA). There’s even a “particle generator.” Make tones, create modular synths and effects you can modulate live, or play back sample/loop content.
• Noatikl, the generative engine: Here’s the good bit. Based on the evolution of the same Koan system employed by Brian Eno, Noatikl is a scriptable “hyperinstrument” that can generative musical structures. Partikl is designed to work with it, so part of your musical structure can be modulating your synths, effects, and samples. The full Noatikl doesn’t run inside Mixtikl, but a runtime does, so it can play back generative structures instead of limiting you to static MIDI files and the like.
• Static content support: Even the most rigorous advocate of generative music will likely concede that some pre-determined content can be useful. So the suite supports static scores and audio files (OGG, WAV, AU, MIDI, MOD).
• Apps to use them together: Remixer, Performer, and Player let you combine these elements for live use.
• Packs: Tiklpak content  are generative packs that show off what the thing can do.
• Desktop support: Mac, Windows. And having the ability to use plug-ins means authoring should be much easier.
• Mobile support: Windows Mobile at launch (for almost any resolution currently available, even including Windows Mobile smartphones). Coming soon: Symbian, iPhone/iPod touch, and the multi-platform Antix Game Player (have to admit, hadn’t heard of that one).

Mixtikl Download Page [Desktop, Mobile]

Press release

Pricing: US$9.99-29.99 for Mixtikl; Noatikl $79.99+; various bundles and limited-time coupons available – but you can get up and running with quite a lot for around ten bucks

It’s good to hear the iPhone is back on the list after some doubts from Intermorphic earlier this year. (Apple easing up on restrictions may have helped!) The Intermorphic crowd note that:

If you do get a chance to play with it, do try out some of the Noatikl generative items in the Tikpak Cinematic 120d, which is one of two Tiklpaks that comes embedded with Mixtikl. The generative items show up as red in the content list. As some of these also use Partikl to dynamically create the their sounds (they do a lot) and they also use FX, these ones can really slow up your device, as they do consume a fair amount of processing power.

There’s something appealing about being able to take a generative composition with you, whether it’s listening on the go or actually remixing or performing with it. So the mobile delivery thing is really important.

It’s taken some time to develop this, so it’ll likewise take some time for us to spend some time with Mixtikl. Stay tuned – and let us know if there’s anything you’d like us to specifically see.