Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community.

What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting all its functionality into the DS’ two compact screens. Its minimal interface finds an elegant arrangement of everything you most urgently need, with a sequencer screen on one DS screen and basic virtual analog synth parameters on the other. A 4 x 4 matrix next to the main sequencer grid lets you switch between patterns, in a step sequencer reminiscent of the monome and Tenori-On. There isn’t a whole lot of depth to event editing in this early version, but it could be a lovely way to sketch melodic patterns. (And some of those limitations come from the DS itself. Note, though, that this app gets a full 16 real-time channels on the original DS hardware to the Korg DS-10’s paltry two.)

Developer Fanta/Hotelsinus Sound Design has been posting mock-ups, demos, and now builds as he goes. That means that he gets feedback from an audience of readers and incorporates those as he develops the app – another key difference between the DIY/homebrew scene and conventional commercial development.

More good news: this DS app should also run as a PC VST in a forthcoming version, opening up the fun to folks using netbooks and laptops instead of the DS and creating a nice mobile-to-computer workflow.

http://ndscomposer.blogspot.com/

In related Nintendo DS news: If you’re thinking about getting the new DS-10 Plus Limited Edition of the KORG DS-10, you’ll need to get it for the region coding of your DS. (In other words, you probably won’t want to import it.) The “Dual Mode” functions are region-locked, so North American and European users can’t use the Japanese DS-10. That’s not such a big deal, as North American distribution was announced, and other regions are expected to follow, but it’s good to know. See details on the All Things KORG DS-10 blog. (Thanks, DS-10 Dominator!)

Check out some demo videos and a quick run-down on specs, and if you’ve got the capability to run homebrew, you can give this a try. Thanks to Art/toitoy for the tip!

• Two oscillators with fixed oscillators, ADSHR envelopes
• Filter section (in development)
• Ring modulation and “cross” mixing (cross-fading between oscillators)
• 16×16 step sequencer, 4×4 pattern selection

Clearly, there’s a lot of work still to be done, so test this build at your own risk. But it’s already good fun, and the coming roadmap looks logical, with filter options, disk rendering, song mode, and more in store. It’s also an interesting read as far as wrangling with emulators and some of the challenges of DS development.

As you may know, the creators of games like Grand Theft Auto have collaborated with Timbaland to bring a mobile music studio to Sony’s PSP (and later, the iPhone), based on an ambitious free Flash experiment on their Website. Now, it’s my impassioned belief that you shouldn’t need lots of canned loops or celebrity endorsements to make music fun, so normally I might actually run the opposite direction of any story starting with that line. But here’s the surprise: underneath, the app is more powerful than I expected.

I’ve gotten an early preview of the title in person at Rockstar’s offices here in New York, and was also able to grill their developers on geeky details of how the sound engine is put together. A test copy isn’t yet available so I can’t properly review the app, but I am at least able to talk about some of what lies beneath the PSP screens and marketing.

For some time, a select few have known that the Sony PSP’s secret is that it’s a powerful handheld computer, ideal for mobile music. Brilliant-but-underground apps like PSPSEQ and PSP Rhythm capitalized on this potential, but required you hack your PSP in order to run them, because Sony restricts launching non-authorized applications from memory.

Beaterator is the first full-featured app that can be run directly on the PSP. Some people may not look past the fact that it comes from a game company, past its (admittedly) thick layer of marketing glitz and celebrity endorsement. But based on a first look, I believe Beaterator is the most powerful music app ever released through game channels, surpassing in functionality even the recent cult hit Korg DS-10 for the Nintendo DS.

In the interest of disclosure, I have a confession: I didn’t expect to have any interest in Beaterator at all. I was concerned that the musical experience would be watered down (though more on what I actually discovered below). The fact that this game had one artist – Timbaland – literally dancing around the screen talking about how it’s his game I thought would be a deal killer. And, of course, it’ll be impossible to talk about this game without the shadow of the “Acidjazzed Evening” controversy, which aleges Timbaland plagiarized music by Finnish composer Janne Suni – made worse by a lawsuit and a glib interview in which the artist responded, “It’s from a video game, idiot.” Timbaland is by no means the first artist to get into trouble with an uncleared sample, but the fact that it was a much lesser-known artist and that the situation was handled less than gracefully certainly created a credibility issue in the enthusiast community.

I bring those issues up front, because I know readers will bring them up. But what intrigues me about Beaterator is that it has an essentially split personality. At one moment, Beaterator is an animated Timbaland talking to you while you trigger canned loops with game buttons, neither game nor, really, a music creation app. At another moment, though, it’s a full-blown music sequencer you can carry around on your PSP, with some retro design and sound features that might actually make it appealing. And I think it’d be unfair to cover one side without the other.

The marketing for Beaterator focuses on the thousands of loops assembled by Timbaland and Rockstar. But Beaterator isn’t limited to those loops. What you likely won’t see emphasized in the gaming press:

• Sampling: You can make your own samples using the mic (or, if you can find it, you can add a PSP microphone)
• Audio import: You can import WAV files from a computer, as easily as dropping them onto a MemoryStick.
• Audio export: You can save your work as an audio file. Rockstar will have its own site for exchanging your music with other users, but that will be limited to the built-in effects (I’m guessing so they don’t have to police piracy). But that won’t stop you from exporting audio on your MemoryStick and using it however you like.
• MIDI import and export: While even many serious iPhone games lack this functionality, you can use Beaterator as a mobile MIDI editing workstation.
• Grown-up interface and effects: Beaterator has real audio effects, with real labels. The Compressor has labels like Gain and Ratio, instead of, you know, “Phatness” or “AMPMEUP.” It’s a clue that this really is a tool and not a game.
• It’s-a-me … not! Game cartoon character heads never appear in the interface – though I do have to admit, those Mario Paint Mario noteheads were cute. (For the PSP, might I suggest semidemiquavers with the face of Kratos?)

I love my desktop sequencers, but having these kinds of features in a comfortable-to-hold mobile device you take anywhere, being able to fly through settings with the PSP buttons, and lots of little details added by the Rockstar developers like confining pattern editing to scales and keys make Beaterator look like something that’ll be fun to use. After a couple of minutes, I was ready to charge up my PSP and fire up Beaterator alongside PSPSEQ.

Inside Beaterator’s Engine

Beaterator began several years ago on Rockstar’s website. Before making full-blown music production tools with Flash was popular, before the idea of “cloud editing” had become a buzzword, a side project at Rockstar yielded a free Flash game, which you can still play. The interface is loop-based and reminiscent of tools like ACID, GarageBand, and Fruity Loops. But it’s surprisingly minimal, capable of full-blown pattern and loop editing, includes real-time effects, and comes with a selection of loops from some of my all-time favorite producers – A.VEE & 3D, Juan Atkins, King Britt, Matthew Dear, and Steinski. Side note: please, Rockstar, can we have a custom version of Beaterator with those producers?

http://beaterator.rockstargames.com/beaterator.html

Having talked to mobile developers both big and indie, I was curious about the technical details of Beaterator’s implementation – especially after being impressed in a short demo by capabilities that went beyond what I had expected. Rockstar replied with some very particular details from the developers. I think the answers say a lot about what’s possible on the PSP – even with that iPhone version in the works – and how a handheld sequencer on mobile hardware can be put together.

PK: So, I see eight tracks, some effects – what are the capabilities of the underlying audio engine in Beaterator?

Rockstar: Our engine runs at 16-bit stereo, 22.05kHz throughout. As you say, there are 8 tracks, each of which each can have up to two insert effects* summed into a stereo mix. Each track also has a stereo pre-fader Send to a dedicated reverb buss which runs a global reverb unit which is also added into the output. The channel level, pans, aux send and all effects parameters can be automated to 1-bar resolution, as can the final mix output level, pan, and the global reverb parameters. At any given time, each of the 8 tracks can be playing either a sample-based Melody/Drum loop (with 8 channel polyphony), a monophonic synth melody loop, or a mono/stereo timestretched audio loop.

Our sequencer also supports 8 channels, at 4ppqn. The maximum song length is 240 bars, and we are fixed to 4/4 time. BPM ranges from 60-300, and there is a simple 16th-note swing control as well.

The insert effects we support are: Compressor, Chorus, Delay, Distortion, 3-band EQ, Multimode Resonant Filter, Flanger, Noise Gate, Phaser & Tremolo.

A lot of the editing (aside from vocals, really) appears to be in MIDI pattern editing. Is this always triggering a sampled instrument, or is there live synthesis / DSP going on under the hood at all? (I know the PSP is capable of such things.) Do you have any control over the timbre of the instruments, or just the musical patterns?

We trigger either our pitched sample playback code or our own DSP synthesiser on a channel. The sample playback code is a fairly simple 8-voice (which means a theoretical maximum polyphony of 64 if you are playing 8 samples on each of the 8 channels) pitchshifter (no multisampling), with no real control of timbre (no filters). But it does support velocity sensitivity (although this has to be sequenced as the PSP buttons aren’t velocity sensitive) and a full ADSR amplitude envelope.

The inbuilt synth is monophonic (but you can run one per channel, so up to 8 in theory). It’s a simple 3-oscillator Virtual Analog design. Each oscillator has a smoothly-morphable waveshape from Sine, through Triangle, Sawtooth, Square and finally to 10% Pulse) and has independent +/-2 octave pitch and +/-1 semitone detune controls. There is also a separate white-noise generator. The synth also has its own multimode resonant filter (24dB/octave Low Pass, 12dB/octave Low Pass, 12dB/octave Band Pass, 12dB/octave High Pass and 24dB/octave Low Pass modes) with controllable keyboard tracking. There are two ADSR envelope generators, one locked to amplitude controls, and the other freely assignable to the modulation matrix. There are also two LFOs with multiple shapes and speeds. These three modulation sources can be freely assigned to any of the 14 modulation destinations, which amounts to 42 modulation slots. Unfortunately, none of the parameters of the synth can be automated.

Pattern editing in Beaterator does not use MIDI internally – The game is locked to 4ppqn on a five-octave keyboard, and the melody notes use a unique pitch bend/portamento technique which doesn’t map directly onto MIDI pitch bend events. However, we can import and export MIDI files with a reasonable degree of accuracy, which is a feature we think will be particularly useful.

I’m already impressed by some of the editing capabilities – I was surprised to see a brief glimpse of envelope rubber-banding. Any other specifics you want to talk about in terms of editing possibilities?

As explained above, we have ADSR envelope control throughout, and we are particularly proud of our Synthesizer. Our sound waveform editor supports most of the normal editing tools you would expect (trim, insert silence, normalisation), and also allows you to set up sustain regions for the sample playback engine, timestretch and slice the waveform.

Okay, so let’s imagine I’ve got a bunch of audio loops on my drive and want to do, effectively, what Timbaland did with his loops. Do you have as much control over authoring loops for Beaterator as Rockstar? Are there limitations on this feature?

You can freely import and edit any 44.1kHz or 22.05kHz mono or stereo uncompressed 16-bit WAV into Beaterator (we have 9MB of sample memory available in any one song). You can edit these however you like (indeed we use these tools ourselves to generate content).

Do you need to prepare your loops at a fixed bpm? If I bring in a 120 bpm loop and change the tempo to 144, does my loop stretch? (If it’s doing stretching, the audio warping engine sounds really fantastic!)

We do timestretch loops to match the songs tempo (but this can be disabled if desired). You can also over-stretch sounds for that early-90s “granular timestretch” effect. Thanks for the compliments on our warping engine too!

I’ve got a soft spot for 90s digital, I think. What was the emphasis of the Rockstar team in terms of their samples and musical genres?

The focus was on loops that could work well with most genres. We like to think you can create songs from Rock to Rap with the selection we present.

Is it (You) Live, or is it Timbaland?

Beaterator gets at the heart of what’s happening with the way music creation is packaged in a digital age. Rockstar contrasted their title with things that are “games,” like the Rock Band/Guitar Hero mold that was refined by Harmonix. Rockstar emphasizes creative music creation and deemphasizes gaming. At the same time, they pack the title with pre-made loops and are concerned about whether what you do will easily sound good, or whether you’ll be overwhelmed by the genuinely powerful tools underneath. Beaterator, unlike Rock Band, is not about playing along with your favorite artists – but clearly Rockstar is betting that Timbaland is a favorite artist of prospective buyers, and that you will try to sound like him and use his loops. Rock Band makes no such attempt to be creative. The Beatles, coming out next week, is about playing along with the Beatles. (I recall singing along with my sister when we were kids, and I was someone who grew up taking weekly piano lessons.) Yet the “game” in this case does just the opposite – instead of trying to be easier, the whole selling point is a ramped difficulty curve. Maybe the reason studies are showing people graduating from Rock Band to real instruments is that, eventually, if you seek out difficulty, you need to go beyond the game. (Actual instruments: they’re the ultimate expansion pack.)

It’s a paradox, but it’s not a paradox restricted to gaming. You can take the conflict above and apply it to the way all music technology is marketed. On one hand, you have software that’s almost comically complex – sometimes offering so many options that it’s hard even for people with doctoral-level training in digital signal processing to make actual music. On the other, from many of the same vendors, you have pre-built loop libraries and presets with push-button simplicity, requiring less musical coordination or rhythm than, well, Rock Band on Easy mode.

All of us, like our technology, have a split personality when we use digital tech. But maybe the ultimate question is a simple one: can you make something?

I’ll reserve that question in regards to Beaterator until I get a final version. I was set to take a development build home with me, but I do have to wait until the final release. I do think these are interesting questions, though.

Oh, and say what you will about Timbaland, but animated Timbaland has some sort of nuclear control panel that he uses to DJ from. I want a real one. Surplus shopping, anyone?

Stay tuned for a look at the finished product. If fans of mobile game music were willing to use Mario Paint to get an extremely basic song editor, I think Beaterator could be a revelation. And in addition to looking at music production in Beaterator well beyond what might qualify as “Rock” or “Rap,” I think it’s long overdue for a guide to the other independent apps for the PSP. (In fact, I just got a new one in my inbox), so watch for that, too, in a separate story.

Videos from Rockstar (all images and videos are of the PSP version, not the iPhone)…

Now, I talk too much. The best way to make my argument? Listen to the kids. Their favorite feature: recording their own voice.

I rest my case.

Amanda Ervin makes elegant noise-making apparatuses from simple circuits, and is able to share that process with her students (see her classes among 3rd Ward’s Circuits lineup). She’s going to show off some of her latest creations at the open showcase of Handmade Music Brooklyn, our monthly party + science fair + musical performance + ruckus. (More details soon on Handmade Music events that are springing up worldwide, thanks to the hard work and creativity of the DIY music community!)

What really impresses me about these projects is that Amanda has made both the project and the curriculum – that is, she can teach you to make these, too! It’s often easier to make something for yourself alone than it is to make it reproducible, so I do admire that in a design.

If you’re in the New York area, you can catch the event free, Thursday evening September 17. (Directions) If not, we’re working with 3rd Ward on ways to translate the educational experience online.

Here’s a musical excerpt from Amanda, as well:
Animal.mp3

Handmade Music info: More on Amanda’s work (with additional sounds and videos) on our Handmade Music site:

Handmade Music Brooklyn: Amanda Ervin’s Circuits, Open Call

Want to contribute your work? If you can make it to NYC this month, we’d love to present your work. All projects, all media (electronic, acoustic, hardware, software), and all levels of functionality (working, partially working, in-progress, completely broken) are welcome!

Handmade Music 9/17 Call for Works [Google Docs form, also embedded after the jump]

Bored with mouse pushing and knob twiddling? The d-touch tangible sequencer / drum machine makes a cheap interface (with free downloadable software) for assembling sequences. Make some (attractive) blocks, set up a webcam, and plug into your computer. I took a first look at this tool last month, and noted its use in sequencing walnuts. (Yes, the ones that fall from trees.) Since then, the developers have been hard at work on updates. Enrico writes:

We just released the d-touch sequencer, a new, more advanced, audio application. In the sequencer you can record your own samples in real time.

We also have few updates for the drum machine, which should solve the activation problems we were having at the beginning.

Go grab the markers and the software, and you have your own webcam-based drum machine.

Should you decide to go beyond their free instrument, the underlying system is really quite sophisticated. Part of what makes it beautiful is that you can design your own markers rather than settling for predefined patterns, as with most similar marker-tracking systems. There’s even a tool for correcting problems in your design. The freely-downloadable analysis software is written in C/C++, but if you use another environment (like Max or Processing or Reaktor), you can simply pipe data to your tool of choice.

The drum machine and sequencer are available now, so go download them and let you know how you fare! System requirements: a printer, a webcam, and a PC/Mac. Enjoy!

http://www.d-touch.org/

For some hands-on impressions of working with these things, the excellent PC Music Guru has a great description of the experience. Or, if you read the language, there’s a Japanese-language hands-on blog entry.

Float away with Mujik… from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Musical technology is often designed to be “hard” in character. Interfaces are cold and technological-looking, futuristic like spaceships, or made to replicate antique gear to make guitarists feel nostalgic. Musical interfaces consciously avoid anything “childish” – calling something a “toy” being the worst possible insult – and they’re certainly never whimsical.

That’s why the real news about Mujik isn’t that it’s a new iPhone app, or that, after a few weeks of teasers, you can download it today on the iTunes store. (The app is free for a limited time.) The news is that it’s a musical interface with lightning bugs.

Mujik teaser… from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

The creators, led by Yann Seznec, clearly had this goal in mind:

Do you want an iPhone app to make beats? And produce like totally awesome tracks with a zillion channels and plugins and automation and 808 simulators and stuff yeah? Oh. Well, this is not for you. Mujik is more than a music app – get away from fake sliders and buttons and enter the world of Mujik, with charming graphics, lovely music, and a wonderfully tactile interface. It’s not rocket science, it’s just fun.

Mujik is brought to you by Lucky Frame, a small team of awesome people based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s lovely here, you should come visit.

You can’t save yet, but I rather like that. And while you can’t yet add your own sounds (which they’re also working on), I actually can imagine this would be something you’d share with your friends who are intimidating by the arcane, unreadable tracker you have installed on your hacked Game Boy.

On the team: Yann Seznec is also known as The Amazing Rolo, who we’ve seen previously on CDM making a free Wii looping machine, and who recently did a three-part series just for CDM on the Maker Faire. (one, two, three)

Thanks to Chris Hahn on Twitter for the tip!

Gestural Music Sequencer from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Something as simple as remapping a single knob can give you new musical ideas. So expand that to entire gestures and live video input, and you can help push your performance in new directions and out of old habits. That’s why it’s always great to see projects like the Gestural Music Sequencer.

Built entirely in free tools – tools fairly friendly even to non-coders – the GMS lets composer and musician John Keston explore new ideas through gestures captured in a video stream. It’s easier to see than to talk about, so check out the just-completed documentary short by Josh Klos, with the aid of Julie Kistler and Brian Smith. (And yes, documentation makes a huge difference; we’d love to see more of this stuff!)

The ingredients:

• Processing, the free, multiplatform coding environment [site | cdmu tag | cdmo tag]
• controlP5, a lovely, light, quick-and-dirty library for UI controls
• Ableton Live – though you could substitute other software via MIDI, Live makes a nice, familiar interactive music engine

Lots more information on John Keston’s wonderful Audio Cookbook blog, which is fast becoming one of my favorite reads:

http://audiocookbook.org/category/gms/

And here’s a really lovely video that demonstrates what you can do with video. It uses a string of lights in a jar as the source. Yes, in a way, it’s almost like having a very focused random generator, but I think there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s an almost analog approach to seeing the source, and using that to organically create music.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

I have to observe, while this works reasonably well with MIDI, it reveals why standardizing on networked communication, as OSC does, makes more sense. In a world of software, “controller” can really mean anything you like. Control is increasingly about software talking to software – including when devices are involved, since they generally have a software layer of their own. Also, because sometimes it’s easier to code this with Processing than with Max, I can see some powerful uses of the Python-based Live API, which we expect to mature later this year. (Yes, the project called Live API seems to be in a holding pattern, but we may be able to work up a more complete, Live 8-ready alternative.)

By the way, our goal is to make noisepages a platform and collection of tools for people doing this sort of work (or anything creative with music and motion), even if you host your blog elsewhere. Stay tuned for the details on that.

The translation of music from something largely invisible to a physical object is oddly beautiful, even when imperfect. That’s part of why we’re working on the Tangible Interface Hackday – less than 48 hours away now.

Here are a couple of additional sources of inspiration as we prepare.

At bottom, Guy John has made a sequencer out of one of the world’s most ancient games, Go. Over two millenia ago, Chinese people were passing the hours playing this game, so it’s an incredible way of connecting our passtimes today with the leisure time of our ancient ancestors – and a sign that gaming is a part of culture that endures. It’s fitting, too, as a lot of computer musical interfaces can be thought of as games. This particular game uses Max/MSP/Jitter and the CV Jitter externals for image analysis, then translates the game into a grid. Guy’s idea is fairly early in development, so I actually think you could go all sorts of different directions with this basic concept. (As seen in Hack a Day at the end of last year.)

At top, the Graphite Sequencer translates optical images made in the electricity-conducting material to sound in a simple turntable. It’s lovely seeing these patterns as sound objects, especially since usually we go the other way (trying to find patterns to affix to sounds). The same basic graphite-conducting process is used in the business card PAiA kit we showed at a past Handmade Music, as well as the Drawdio pencil (based on the same circuit).

Graphite Sequencer (2006), as seen recently via the blog of the fabulous-looking Montreal Elektra Festival

I’d love to see people continue to combine these fairly basic analog-style techniques – or thousands-year-old games – with the newer digital approach. Let us know what you come up with, creative folk.

For those of you longing to mutate beats like so many promiscuous Petri Disk bacteria, programmer Bret Truchan is a kindred spirit. Bret has created a series of instant experimental classics for the Nintendo DS: glitchDS, a cellular automaton music sequencer, repeaterDS, a visual sample mangler, and cellDS, a grid-based sequencer you can script in Lua.

The Nintendo DS is portable and cute, but it’s not normally open to running software without the Nintendo Seal of Quality. (Insert snickers here.) To run Bret’s software, you need specialized hardware that fools the DS into running software. The DS isn’t entirely stable when it comes to things like timing, either, and it doesn’t have the flexibility of computers.

Enter the netbook. The netbook is nearly as portable, completely open to running whatever you like on Windows or Linux, and boasts easy USB connectivity, a big screen, and … well, you know, all the things you like about laptops. When it comes to musical productivity, much as I love the DS, the netbook has a whole lot going for it, and still has that added ultra-portability that makes you feel you can make music anywhere.

Bret recently made the jump to desktop software with Quotile, a step sequencer you can live-code for mighty morphing beats. Quotile is cool, but for many, glitchDS was the star. Now you can run glitchDS anywhere – just the job for a laptop you were going to retire, or that new netbook.

Not Sequencing, Glitch Sequencing

Glitch-sequencer is a sequencer, so it needs to either talk to a software synth or external hardware. Bret likes to hook it up to his machinedrum and monomachine. Our own Handmade Music event was the (unofficial) first public outing of the software, and included an HP netbook and the machinedrum, which makes for a sweet, mobile combination.

Despite the appearance of a grid and sequences of levels, this isn’t an app that works like a conventional sequencer. Here’s the basic breakdown:

• Cellular Automata via a seed + playback grid
• Trigger and value sequencers to determine which MIDI events the organically-generated mutations produce
• Pattern length, clock division settings for setting metric values
• Sync settings

There are two grids, a “seed” sequencer that initializes a starting pattern, and a “playback” sequencer that provides feedback and control of the pattern that plays as the software runs. These two grids operate via principles of Cellular Automata, specifically the John Horton Conway Game of Life model, a evolutionary grid “game” that has been popular in computer music for its simplicity and the way it becomes animated in time. (The Game of Life is a “zero-player game,” which I suspect is probably the only truly fun way to play Monopoly.)

The playback sequencer is just a set of cells. To determine when each cell actually trigger events, you use a neat, color-coded trigger sequencer, which, as it sounds, is what calls MIDI events. Using the value sequencers for each color-coded swatch, you determine what that message is. In fact, if you wanted, you could use glitch-sequencer to control only effects parameters or envelopes instead of notes – or visuals, or anything that can be triggered by MIDI.

As you’ve got seeded grids doing their organic, unpredictable thing, you’ll likely want a little bit of control, too, and you have mechanisms for that. There’s a pattern length grid which determines pattern length in a more conventional way, plus a clock division setting for setting the master rhythmic division. There’s also a snapshot setting, which itself is presented as a grid so you can make little glitchy song arrangements by triggering different settings.

Where all of this gets fancy is the additional trigger settings. In addition to the MIDI event values, you get:

• Gate percentage for randomized probabilities
• Clock division
• Loop length
• Quantization for pitch (none, Ionian, Phrygian)

You can also manage the color-coded swatches as layers and mix their volume independently.

My one-line version of the manual: with that many parameters, screw around a bit and you’ll get something pretty unpredictable and glitchy.

This concept is related to other attempts to do similar, Game of Life-based sequencers, particularly Lazyfish’s Newschool for Reaktor, and (applied to an effect) Audio Damage’s Automaton. Because tiny implementation details can have a big impact on the resulting sound, though, it’s always nice having a new take on this, and I think Bret’s creation is unique in its ability to tightly control the sequence or completely screw things up with a lot of parameters.

It is all built in Processing, the free, open-source Java-based coding environment. I’m hoping to get a scoop on some of the experience Bret had with timing and Java, so stay tuned. Processing coders, the MIDI library Bret used is themidibus. There’s a trick to getting MIDI working on the Mac thanks to the fact that Apple decided to stop supporting a standard Java API in their implementation (doh!), but once you hurdle that, you’ve got Mac + Windows + Linux support – and this could be ported to Android, too, with a little work.

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

What happens when you put all the digital and electronic tools you love together into one groove session? I expect it probably looks something like this video. Welcome to the new digital music age: DIY electronics, vintage digital tech (Game Boys), and modern computer tech (Monome as Arduinome clone, Max/MSP, and shiny MacBook) all coexist. And a fair bit of what you see if a modern hybrid of old and new paradigms, like the thoroughly modernized Tracker Renoise. Thomas Margolf says “Greetings from Rotterdam” and writes,

We made a first Jam using the new GorF step-sequencer, Arduinome, max msp patch ‘Soyuz’, a Gameboy running LittleSoundDJ, LSDJMC2 Gameboy Midi-Interface, Renoise, Ableton Live and a Nord Micro-Modular. It’s the first session with a fresh soldered GorF.

Lovely stuff. Keep on soldering and jammin’, folks. Okay, tagging this story is going to take … a lot of tags.