NodeBeat is the kind of experimental music application that’s thriving in the age of the multi-touch tablet. Its dynamic interface and sound are built on the foundation of free and open source software tools regularly covered here on CDMusic and Motion. OpenFrameworks, the Processing-like C++ library, handles the UI, as libpd, the embeddable version of graphical media environment Pure Data, manages the sound.

What you get is an open-ended plane on which you can graphically array sequences, far away from the standard grid, for generative and sequenced music. It’s good fun, which made it a hit on iOS. Developer Seth Sandler, working with Justin Windle, did a brilliant job. Then, earlier this month, NodeBeat made the jump to Android, with additional porting work by Laurence Muller. Android has been getting tablets that can hold their own — I’ve enjoyed my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, for instance. But the platform has remained severely starved of applications in contrast to iOS, but at least in place of quantity, there’s some quality: this application being one, tools like Mikrosonic’s RD3 or Reactable orControl or Nanoloop qualifying, too. (I’m not delusional; this does not make it at this point any serious competition for iOS, but it does demonstrate potential for developers. And I’ve already had the chance to use Reactable and Control in live performance, personally.)

That is, NodeBeat was temporarily available on Google’s Android Market. Then, without warning, Google suspended developer Seth Sandler’s seller account. This led to an extended discussion with Seth, other developers, and myself as we watched events unfold, ironically on Google’s own Google+. (Yes, that Google product works, despite what you’ve heard.)

It’s back now, so please, go buy and review it if you get the chance. If you’ve got a compatible Android, you’ve got truly no excuse as it’s a delightful app, and it holds up even in the crowded iOS platform:
NodeBeat @ Android Market
http://nodebeat.com/ (iOS and all versions; there’s even a free, desktop version with source code!)

Okay? Bought it? Good. Now it’s time to talk about how bad this is for a developer.

The account suspension on the Market represents a series of obvious flaws. First, of course, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place – Google support eventually acknowledged the suspension was entirely random, “incorrectly suspended” in the words of support, with no other explanation.

Second, support was largely nonexistent. Days passed during which Seth was left without any information. (Amidst discussions of how “evil” or “open” Google is, I’d sometimes be happy just to see them seem something other than desperately rushed. And that seems to be the primary “Apple-fication” of the market – the company’s rivals now are so rushed to try to compete that they screw things up constantly. “Don’t be crappy.”)

Third, and most bizarre, the application stayed available but payment was impossible, leaving customers confused and unable to buy the app.

Now, horror stories like this weren’t unheard of in the early days of the Apple App Store, and I still hear – with, happily, much less frequency – complaints from developers about Apple’s store and approval process. Apple deserves credit for ironing out those flaws, but from the skeptical perspective of a developer, It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that you may want to consider distributing your software via more than one means. Even as Apple fails to allow that on their mobile devices, that means considering going cross-platform. That’s not a philosophical claim; from the perspective of a developer, you don’t want to be dependent on only one company. Feel free to disagree, but my experience has shown otherwise as I’ve watched developers get burned. (And it’s worth noting that while Google couldn’t sell Seth’s app, Apple could.) Technically, via Android, developers are free on the vast majority of devices to sell direct or sell via alternative stores; unsurprisingly, Seth submitted his app to the competing Amazon App Store and is awaiting approval there.

None of this, of course, excuses Google from a big customer failure on Android Market. And whereas Apple’s earlier hiccups occurred as it was the only game in town, Google is making an uphill battle even worse. With Amazon’s Fire on the horizon, there are two questions to watch: one, can Amazon deliver enough tablets to create the tablet market Android has thus far lacked, and two, will their store deliver a better experience? Meanwhile, Google continues to promise a better Market; it’s all I hear about at developer events, largely because it’s the primary complaint from developers. As tech pundits make largely-unsupported claims like “Android users don’t like to buy software,” as if they’re a bunch of degenerate freeloaders, I’d point to the often-inferior Market and frustrating hardware experiences.

But, let’s put it this way: in addition to the obvious range of iOS choice, yes, there are superb applications beginning to appear on Android. For that, I credit developers like Seth and his collaborators. Even as we push for better audio performance, some of those applications are already running exceptionally well on new tablets and higher-end phones. If you have one of these devices, you can fire these up and enjoy making some sounds. And because you can’t always rely on another vendor to get things right, having cross-platform, free and open source tools behind these applications means developers have the flexibility to adapt to a changing market, and to focus on creative design and not constantly reinventing the wheel.

Here are some notes on NodeBeat’s creation on our forums.

And let us know what you think of NodeBeat, or if you do have an Android device you’re using for music (or a Fire on pre-order, for that matter).

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

What makes music software popular? Simple recording, DJ, and remix apps unsurprisingly do well. But perhaps as a testament to the importance of individual music expression, some stranger entries do, too. And those less-typical software creations can give you new ways of exploring music creation and performance. Just take Nodal.

GarageBand sits comfortably at the top of the sellers list on Apple’s App Store. But, at least briefly, a generative composition tool has rocketed to second place. Nodal 1.7, available for both Mac and Windows, is unlike most music production tools. In place of linear track arrangement, clusters of graphical nodes represent musical structure, awaiting real-time experimentation. In a network you create, “virtual players” produce patterns by traversing a geometric map defining pitch, rhythm, and sequence.

Nodal and tools like it have always been able to create musical machines from simple elements, letting the user define an arrangement and then set it in motion. But Nodal 1.7 is a major release in that it allows MIDI control, so that you can actually “play” the structure and not just sit back and let it roll.

This isn’t just for ambient music lovers, either – sync features mean you can use Nodal just as easily in rhythmic pieces or even dance music.

Developer Peter Mcilwain tells CDM:

We think new features make [Nodal 1.7] a serious composing tool. Firstly, it can be synced to other applications. Next, individual networks can be triggered (like clips in Ableton) from MIDI notes. The velocity levels in these networks can be scaled according to the velocity of the triggering note. Also, the edges or connections between nodes can now contain MIDI controller curves. This is all demonstrated in [the YouTube clip at top].

The triggering aspect means that you can perform with a generative system in a very intuitive way. Also, I have been working on a piece for a flute ensemble in which I create a triggering score in Logic. This information is then sent to Nodal. Nodal then sends back MIDI which is rendered and recorded in Logic. I’m finding this a fascinating and natural way to work.

Nodal has slipped a bit since Peter first contacted me, but seeing this among the top Mac App Store apps to me is tremendously satisfying. Peter tells us they’re not giving up their day jobs, but it’s nice just to get to support great software.

Nodal: Generative Music Software

I’d love to hear more about Nodal here, especially if you’re making interesting stuff with it. Of course, to discuss with other Nodal users, your best bet is the Nodal discussion group:

Support | Nodal Google Group

The development team – Jon McCormack, Alan Dorin, Aidan Lane, Jon McCormack and Peter McIlwain of Monash University’s Centre for Electronic Media Art in Australia – have published technical papers, too:

Nodal R&D / Technical Papers

Nodal fans / users … or other folks doing development … we’d love to hear from you.

For more generative goodness, see also:

Intermorphic and Noatikl / Mixtilk, a cross-platform system that also includes mobile tools for iOS, from the same team that collaborated with Brian Eno and worked on the landmark SSEYO Koan system.

Hans Kuder’s Tiction uses graphical nodes as does Nodal, and, built in Processing, works on any OS (including Linux). Unfortunately, I’m not sure what happens to Hans or the tool; if anyone knows, let us know.

There are probably others I’m forgetting as the coffee settles in, so chime in in comments.

Brian Eno should be proud. Generative sequencing – making lovely, shimmering music mapped to pleasant-sounding modes – is totally in this season.

At top, exhibit A: Aura Flux, a new iOS ambient music generator. Priced at US$1.99, it nonetheless packs some 48 different instruments, ambient sounds, four keys, save/load capability, and multitasking support. Sequences are arrayed into editable nodes: touch and explore, or tweak specific settings like pulse speed and decay, trigger rates, and pitch to get the results you want.

Generative music has a key advantage for mobile devices, too: it doesn’t take up as much space. In the case of Aura Flux, the whole thing fits in 8 MB.

Apart from the lovely-sounding tunes, what you get is, notably, also more rhythmically complex than in more traditional sequencers, owing to the open-ended manipulation of nodes across the two-dimensional surface. That’s a prime difference between Aura Flux and some of the similar sounds that came out of Yamaha’s Tenori-On; with the exception of a mode or two, Toshio Iwai’s design was intentionally grid-focused, for more minimal, symmetrical rhythms.

Aura 2: Flux @ iTunes
Developer site

In another take on alternative sequencers, our friend Ted Hayes has presented a new video of his Neurohedron. Rather than array steps across a series of rows, as sequencers have done since the days of the Moog Modular (or earlier), steps follow the faces of a dodecahedron, allowing non-linear progression through tones. Ted showed this project at our own Handmade Music in August, as a couple of us accompanied him on piano, as well as on the In/Out Festival. The patch is Pd/Pure Data.

In a way, you can think of the looped step sequencer as a circle — it progresses from the last step back to the first step. In this case, you take that one-dimensional loop and allow it to branch in two dimensions around the faces of the dodecahedron. People are definitely awed by the sculptural aspect of this when they see it in person. Let us know if you have specific questions for Ted and I’ll see if he’ll answer them for us.

http://www.geekdown.com/t3db0t/
New video via Synthtopia

Neurohedron: Overview from Tedb0t on Vimeo.

Imagine friendly creation of custom synths and sounds by dragging visual nodes. Now imagine you can do that on a mobile device and your computer – and eventually combine the two. That’s the vision of Jasuto, and while it’s not quite there yet, it’s incredibly promising.

The laws of combinatorics predict that, on a regular basis, you’ll see countless soft synths that are slight variations of one another. With the iPhone/iPod touch gold rush in full swing, we’re starting to see the pattern repeat itself, just as it did in Windows and Mac plug-ins. Some are brilliant; others are just the usual variations on a theme.

Of course, even better is the ability to build exactly what you want out of the same buildings blocks. Powerful toolkits like Max/MSP, Pd, Reaktor, SuperCollider, SynthMaker and the like let you do this, but they qualify as the more-sophisticated Erector Set of synthesis. Sometimes you just want some simple, LEGO-style building blocks that cover the basics.

That’s why Jasuto looks so promising. It’s actually two pieces of software – a plug-in for Mac and Windows VST. Combine basic modules, and you get some powerful features, even on the iPhone:

• Multiple synthesis methods: additive, subtractive, FM/PM/AM, hard-sync synthesis
• Basic math functions: add/subtract/delta/constant values
• Filters: LP, HP, BP, and a Moog emulation
• Signal tools: envelopes, dynamics processors, and an envelope follower
• Effects: Delay, reverb, saturation, digital distortion
• iPhone hardware features: Accelerator and mic access (and of course mic access on your computer, too)
• 16-step sequencer with looping, pattern manipulation
• Performance options: a tappable keyboard, glide functions, and so on

That’s just the specs, though. To me, the most interesting thing is the zoomable, nodal design, reminiscent of the reactable. There’s also the ability to record “motion” anywhere in the app, and to modulate everything with everything else. And I especially like the idea that “patches” and “synths” are one and the same: just as on an early modular, creating a new “patch” really is about connecting modules into something unique.

I can’t imagine it being the last computer instrument you need, but if successful, it could well be the last iPhone synth you need. I like the idea of

It’s under “heavy development,” so expect some bugs. The software can be yours for all of US$1.00 on iPhone. The PC/Mac VST looks a little rougher, but it’s available for free download.

Jasuto Site

VST Plug-in

iTunes Link

Thanks to sublamp for turning us on to this via comments.

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