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):
Photo: Lara Sobel plays with naturally-synthesized fractals by burning into wood via high voltage.
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.
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.)
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.
Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are exploring right now. Hans Kuder has been sharing a promising-looking project on the CDM forums, built in the code-sketching tool Processing (site | CDMu | CDMo). The idea: explore nodes live and let your sequences float free on the screen.
tiction is a sequencing / performance application that tries to bridge generative music with live improvisation. With it you can create looping (or one-shot) sequences whose pitch and controller values change based on screen position. When a node fires its event, subtle or not-so-subtle physical interactions take place, giving life to the system.
Tiction v0.1 is now available as a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I’ll be adding updates over the next couple weeks, but most of the useful features are already in place.
This is just a graphical interface; actual sound happens elsewhere, via MIDI. (Hans includes instructions for inter-app MIDI on Mac. On Windows, you should try MIDI-Yoke or Hubi’s MIDI Loopback.)
The video above is slightly older than the release you get, so there’s an extra reason to go grab it.
Free software + code + description/instructions for Mac, Windows, Linux. Version 0.1; expecting more soon!
Before someone else says it, no, the idea here isn’t entirely new. It’s especially reminiscent of the work done by Toshio Iwai, best known recently for his Tenori-On hardware and ElectroPlankton DS software, who had experimented with similar interfaces — though generally minus some of the physics here. But then, we got a lot of mileage out of simple step sequencers, and they’ve evolved a lot. It’ll be interesting to see what new interfaces people can cook up.
Those of you Processing users, one tip. Hans is using the ProMIDI Java library, but there’s a better library evolving called RWMidi from our friends over at Ruin & Wesen, plus a driver that will fix problems with MIDI support and Java on some Macs — check out OSXMidiSPI for OS X (direct download).
Brilliant work, Hans! Readers with feedback, please pipe up since Hans asked for it; otherwise, I’ll be interested to see how this evolves!
Imagine this: you have a real-time interface that must be responsive and satisfying, simple enough to be approachable, but sophisticated enough that you’ll want to finely hone your skills over time. You’ll juggle a variety of elements to control with split-second accuracy, but even with elaborate mechanics under the hood, the whole thing, above all, has to be fun.
Sound familiar? It’s a description that’s equally apt for traditional music instruments and modern music software, as much as it is for games. The fact that, once they’re done, a game is often very not like familiar music software and instruments suggests the range of possible solutions to these design challenges. And suddenly, after years in which the games industry clung conservatively to tied and tested models, indie game designers with oddball game designs are grabbing the headlines. Some continue to tackle the meeting point of game and music making. Others offer inspiration for what futuristic 3D musical interfaces might look like.
I unfortunately didn’t make it to the game developer pow-wow that is GDC, but our friend Josh Randall at Harmonix tipped us off with these top picks. Given the blog buzz they’re earning, you may have seen some already, proving great independent game design may not be constrained to obscurity any longer.
Some games are playable on Windows now; Mac users may want to hit up Boot Camp, or watch for release on a console near you. (The pattern seems to be, prototype on PC but ship on consoles where better money can be made.)
It’s the music of the spheres. Or at least, the music of the various, floating geometric shapes, bouncing around a virtual galaxy with gravity simulation. Kepler’s Orrery is a (newly) open-sourced generative music maker, based on a gravity simulation algorithm. As bodies collide, they make sound; it’s a bit like what would happen if you crossed a music box with a snow globe. Different worlds represent different songs. You can reach in and grab some of the objects, so it’s possible to “perform” with the project.
The application runs directly in a web browser (assuming your Java is up to date), and since it’s open source, digging around in the code could inspire your own Java-based musical environment.
And yes, there are some similarities here to the generative music of Brian Eno (soon to be heard in the upcoming Will Wright game Spore) and sound artist/composer Toshio Iwai’s ElectroPlankton game. Perhaps we have a whole genre of musical creation in the works here.
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