Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

If you liked the generative, probability-based sequencing seen earlier this week, here’s another example – and it’s free and open source, so if you do want to pick it apart and you own a copy of Max/MSP or Max for Live, you can. Co-creator Giuseppe Sorce points us to the work:

This is a simple generative music synthesizer built in Max/MSP created by Diego Caponera, Nicolò Paternoster and Giuseppe Sorce. It involves 5 FM generators which play notes randomly based on a root key and intervals defined by the user. It’s an university project made for an exam for Sound’s Science degree ( Math Department of Roma Tor Vergata ).

The software is distributed “as is”, without any warranty, under a GPL license.

Not bad for an exam project. A heck of a lot more fun than a paper (and, believe me, I say that wholeheartedly having done a bit of university teaching).

Grab it:
http://code.google.com/p/smilesynth/

Labeled as ready for IDM or “Braindance” music, The Uncanny Sequencer could be something tasty for those tired of regular rhythms. The creation of Julien Bayle, The Uncanny Sequencer is a graphical, generative, multi-part sequencing Max for Live device built for Ableton Live. At its core, it creates polyrhythms and irregular rhythms by making the appearance of each beat probabilistic rather than determinate.

Thanks to Julien for sending this our way. (Matrixsynth and Synthtopia deserve credit for being faster.)

Features, as described by its creator:

• 8 channels (meaning 8 sequencers in one)
• from 1 to 32 steps in each channel (every number choosable)
• generates MIDI notes to any devices (inside or outside Ableton LIVE)
• based on probabilities
• unique sequences generation
• huge presets bank engine (including morphing between 2 presets)
• 10 pages documentation

€15,00, available for download.

http://designthemedia.com/products/file/13-the-uncanny-sequencer/

In a twist on generating music from dance, artist and coder João Pais sends us Pd-generated scores, transformed into twinkling sounds by music boxes. As it happens, the music boxes are the same featured in Friday’s story on Ritornell.

The piece is RISS, a “performative installation/concert” produced outdoors in Berlin, with a 30-meter score generated by Pd from movement.

João describes his work: “The patch was simple, it analysed the sounds, and made a score using data structures. then I printed the score, and spent lots of hours puncturing all the holes.”

The video documents those sounds, in a project produced by the collaboration of composer and artist Christian Graupner, dancer/choreographer Phuong Nguyen, and João Pais. (For his part, João has been utterly invaluable in helping me with some Pd patches – I need to post some abstractions based on that work soon for everyone.)

More info:
http://www.humatic.net/art/p/riss/index.html

And I know this is just the tip of the … music box iceberg. Sorry, that’s a really horrible mixed metaphor. There are lots of people using music boxes, yes.

You know you’re in for something different with an article that contains this line: “as 256 bytes is becoming the new 4K, there has been ever more need to play decent music in the 256-byte size class. ”

In just a single line of code, Finnish artist and coder countercomplex, working with other contributors, is creating “bitwise creations in a pre-apocalyptic world.” What’s stunning is to listen to the results, even if you have trouble following the code – the results are complex and organic, glitchy but with compositional direction, as though the machine itself had learned to compose in its own, strange language.

This is, naturally, the opposite of the musical coding in the previous post: in place of human-readable languages representing abstractions atop other abstractions, this is pure algorithm transformed into music. Geeky, yes, but it also says something about musical composition and thought independent of the computer. It is as compact an expression of a human musical idea as one could imagine.

I recommend reading the whole blog post (and following the blog for new developments). Embedded in this whole exercise are thoughts about musical algorithms, the history of chip and 8-bit music and the demoscene, and, most interestingly, the question of whether digital music might yet yield “new” (or at least largely unknown) discoveries:

Hasn’t this been done before?

We’ve had the technology for all this for decades. People have been building musical circuits that operate on digital logic, creating short pieces of software that output music, experimenting with chaotic audiovisual programs and trying out various algorithms for musical composition. Mathematical theory of music has a history of over two millennia. Based on this, I find it quite mind-boggling that I have never before encountered anything similar to our discoveries despite my very long interest in computing and algorithmic sound synthesis. I’ve made some Google Scholar searches for related papers but haven’t find anything. Still, I’m quite sure that at many individuals have come up with these formulas before, but, for some reason, their discoveries remained in obscurity.

Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code — how and why? [countercomplex]

But can you dance to it?

Matt Ganucheau contributed to this story from San Francisco.

Sometimes, to quote Depeche Mode, words are very unnecessary. Instead, lose yourself for a few minutes in the vibrating mathemagical lands of numbercult, audiovisual immersions in which sound and geometry fuse in a strange, abstract dance.

Their most recent creation, found via Richard Devine’s prolific Facebook wall and posted earlier this summer, explores an actual audiovisual sequencer. See it at top:

Connected is a graphical/musical sequencer system. a three way flow of information, between graphics, sound and external triggers shape the composition. Recorded in real-time.

But actual functioning interfaces aside, I’ll leave you with some other video clips that traverse similar territory, these syncing up separate visual and audio systems.

These folks make music, too – have a listen to their album, at bottom. And that shifts to body candy, as in, for your butt, with danceable grooves.

All three of the above videos combine vvvv – the Windows-only, graphical patching environment for powerful 3D effects – with Ableton Live for sound.

But lest you think it’s all abstraction, have a listen to their excellent dance release on Bandcamp. Downloading:

http://www.numbercult.com/

By the way, ever wondered what visual software people are using? So did we. Don’t miss this look on our sister site, Create Digital Motion, including where vvvv fits on the spectrum:
What Visual Software Readers Use: Some Clear Favorites, Plenty of Diversity, in Census Results

Sonaur is a US$1.99 ambient toy for Android mobile devices, with on-screen creatures you can manipulate to generate sound. It’s notable not only for being a fun toy – and on a platform that hasn’t had as many fun toys – but because the tools used to create it are also highly accessible and free.

I’ve taught Processing, a code environment popular among artists and designers to people who never before imagined they could be coders. Pd (Pure Data), here in the form of libpd, is a free graphical patching cousin of Max/MSP. You can check out libpd, which allows Pd to run on Android, at our Pd Everywhere group.

Developer Miles describes the app thusly:

I wanted to create an app that lay somewhere between an ecosystem and a musical instrument. The hope is that sonaur requires less attention both, and still provides a reasonable amount of intrigue.

Sonaur contains three distinct lifeforms. You can interact with them individually, or together; creating new sounds and visual patterns for your enjoyment.

I was also curious if he had advice for people exploring this area.

Miles tells us that he found making both the art and sound generative – rather than pre-drawn and pre-recorded – made a big difference. He also suggests reading Andy Farnell’s book Designing Sound (now on MIT Press) as a way of learning both Pd and sound design, saying it “helped me a lot to create the sound of the flying insects.” Another tip: using vectors and not hard-coded pixel values makes your work adaptable to different devices. And, “Matt Pearson’s book Generative Art talks a lot about this but I’ve found too that randomness is great in controlled amounts.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s really great work, Miles. And by the way, readers should never be ashamed of plugging their work, individual or group, free or for-sale. We love hearing about it, even if we can’t cover it all.

Find this at:
http://app.net/sonaur

Via discussion on Noisepages.

Also on Creative Applications Network, run by our friend Filip, which covers all sorts of these kinds of creations.

Composing with rules instead of playing notes directly, composer Richard Garrett has built a series of generative, algorithmic, ambient note makers and processors in Ableton Live and the Max for Live add-on. (And yes, user-generated content continues to be a rationale for why many people would purchase Max for Live in addition to Live itself.)

With loads of useful controls for duration, start, and voicing – and the ability to feed events into anything you like – the results in your own work could sound very different than what you see hear. But whatever your musical aspirations, you can check out the work in action in a demo video (top) and tutorial on how to work with the interface (bottom). And – provided you own Max for Live – it’s all free.

In another interesting twist, this isn’t necessarily just for making self-generating music. The event generator also has an input, so it could accompany live playing or otherwise respond to events.

Here’s how creator Richard describes the work:

I just thought I’d let you know about nwdlbots, my suite of algorithmic (generative) devices for the composition of music within Ableton Live. They include event generators, pitch and velocity selectors and control devices for interaction with each other and with other MIDI tracks and input devices.

As well as generating events at random, nwdlbots can respond to activity on other MIDI tracks in Live, or to input from a MIDI instrument. In effect, nwdlbots control the density of a piece by reducing their activity when things get too busy. They also have some rudimentary ideas about harmony and can follow a chord sequence.

The first set of nwdlbots are available for free download at sundaydance.co.uk. Also on the site: documentation and videos

By the way, this and many other conversations are now happening on LinkedIn:
Ableton Live Users @ LinkedIn [invite group]

nwdlbots (“noodlebots”), free download at Sunday Dance Music

“Noodling” sounds like a great description – and I know many of us musicians do enjoy a good noodle.

AudioGL, a project teased in videos first in April and then again last week, is a new concept in designing a user interface for real-time music creation. Visuals and sound alike are generative, with the rotating, 3D-wireframe graphics and symbolic icons representing a kind of score for live synthesized music. The tracks in the video may sound like they’ve been pre-synthesized, polished, and sampled from elsewhere, but according to the creator, they’re all produced in the graphical interface you see – what you see is what you hear.

The newest video, released this week, reveals in detail the project’s notions of how to make a 3D, live music interface work. The UI itself is similar to other graphical patching metaphors, but here, like exploding a circuit diagram in space, routings and parameter envelopes are seen and edited in a freely-rotating view in three dimensions rather than on a flat plane.

There’s a reason interfaces like this have been few. Computer displays and pointing methods tend to be heavily biased to two-dimensional use, modeled as flat planes like pieces of paper. Working in two dimension is simply easier; there’s no reason you can’t take another layer of parameters and represent it on a two-dimensional interface. And rotating around in 3D space can make it difficult to keep your bearings.

Those challenges, though, don’t make this less interesting – they make it juicier and more delicious as design problem and stunning, futuristic musical model. Freed in three dimensions, a complex set of envelopes and parameters has room to spread out visually, making a kind of spatial score. This particular project strikes an interesting balance between traditional, iconic UI – operators are represented with graphic symbols – and more free-flowing geometry representing the sequencing and envelopes. To me, the latter is more compelling, but putting the two together may make the program more flexible and familiar to users of other music software.

What could knock you out of your chair, though, is the sheer depth of the software teased in the video. This is no simple tech demo: it’s an attempt to build an entirely new, live-synthesizing music tool from scratch in 3D. It’s like the International Space Station of music software, assembled in some void. I got a couple of tips on this today, and some are even wondering if it’s real.

It appears to be very real. Whether this particular tool is usable or not to me almost isn’t important: a spectacular failure in this arena would even be useful. Anyone waiting for some sort of “singularity” in music tech, I think it’s coming: it’s just going to be a singularity of human software ingenuity, explosive creativity and invention from independent developers. I can’t wait.

Stay tuned to find out more about this particular project.

See also the earlier video (not able to grab the embed code for some reason).

Thanks, Bodo Peeters, among others, for the tip.

What’s a “lab,” anyway? For music, any number of tools – software or hardware – can become gateways to creative musical explorations. Chris Stack joins us again to look at Nodal, Mac/Windows software that generates musical patterns from graphical maps of nodes, alongside hardware explorations. Along the way, Chris has some reflections on composition itself. -Ed.

Sometimes life imitates art. Sometimes life imitates avant-garde art. Random events placed together can often form surprising harmonies, causing daily affairs to resemble an aleatoric composition. This concept was brought to mind by the juxtaposition of a pair of recent events.

The first was downloading a demo of Nodal. I was immediately drawn to its unique way of making music. Setting up constantly-evolving soundscapes in multiple time signatures was a breeze. You create music by drawing networks of nodes. Nodes can trigger a set note or step through a list of pitches on each visit. The lines (“edges” in Nodal parlance) connecting them can transmit MIDI continuous controller commands and individual networks may be triggered by external MIDI notes. This is not your father’s sequencer.

I couldn’t wait to dive in, but the second event required me to postpone that for a bit. Event #2 was a visit to the Lake Eden Arts Festival: an incredibly enjoyable amassing of creativity held twice yearly on the grounds of the former Black Mountain College.

Black Mountain College was a progressive educational institution that was home to some of the leading innovators in the arts during the 30s, 40s and 50s. I listened to Maceo Parker play near the spot where Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome and swayed to honky-tonk blues in a log hall where Merce Cunningham once danced. I visited the Bob Moog Foundation’s MoogLab exhibit on the grounds where Einstein was a guest lecturer, all the while thinking of the amazing things I could do with Nodal when I got home. The fact that Black Mountain College was also the site of John Cage’s first Happening also affected my Nodal thought experiments. The irony and beauty of that bit of aleatoric magic still makes me smile.

After the festival, I dove into Nodal headfirst and have had a great time experimenting. It has so far worked seamlessly with my softsynths and external hardware. Pitch lists, velocity lists, random branching and wormholes combined with analog and digital synths and controllers are opening new ways of creating and interacting with music. Cage would have loved it.

Links:

Aleatoric Composition [Wikipedia]

Nodal

Lake Eden Arts Festival

Black Mountain College

Bob Moog Foundation

Nodal provides one way of exploring music onscreen; Chris provides some images of the MoogLab’s hardware for more tactile sound manipulations. You know — for kids!

Many more sounds and explorations on Chris’ Tumblr site:
http://experimentalsynth.tumblr.com/

Previously, Chris shared some work that went from a tiny little phone all the way to a very big set of pedals: From a Little Droid to a Big Moog Taurus Pedal, Analog to Digital, More Experimental Sound Tips