How much can you do with a single line of musical code?

Scoring music using archaic-looking (but relatively fundamental) audio techniques, a group of composers has produced a free album. Each track, produced in the open source, multi-platform audio tool SuperCollider, is produced via only 140 characters of code. The work ranges from electronic grooves to droning ambiences to hypnotic melodic patterns… and yes, a few strange sounds. You can listen to the output as a conventional album, or if you install a copy of SuperCollider, you can run the code yourself – some of the tracks will sound different each time the code is executed.

The album, sc140, was released earlier in the fall but I didn’t get a chance to write about it; readers reminded me as the release of Mixtikl 2 yesterday brought a similar generative score-tweeting feature. Mixtikl’s approach is a little different; SuperCollider here is building sounds from scratch, whereas Mixtikl is tweeting higher-level information about a mix.

All of the code from the project is accessible, so this is an interesting way to learn about the capabilities of SuperCollider, and to find some of the commands you might want to understand if you’re delving in yourself.

If you’re not quite ready for writing code, the track audio is Creative Commons-licensed (BY-NC-SA 3), so you can sample the audio, as well.

sc140 @ SuperCollider site

Article + artist bios at The Wire (who collaborated on this release)

Source code

Album curated by Dan Stowell.

How all this started: SCTwitting, sharing code on Twitter

Lots of interesting artists in there, too, including Sciss aka Hanns Holger Rutz, whose OSC library for Java I’ve been using.

For more SuperCollider coding insanity:

Recreating the THX Deep Note

7up 2.0 – Introduction from makingthenoise on Vimeo.

What if the world of musical performance suddenly started moving a whole lot faster? That’s certainly the case among a handful of monome- and grid-wielding electronic artists.

In an evolutionary breakthrough, what previously had appeared in a period of months is showing up in a period of days, as long-simmering ideas come to the fore. Spurred by the blank-slate, minimal grid of the monome (and its design as mirrored in similar controllers from Livid, Novation, and Akai), musicians are re-imagining the step sequencer in new permutations. Many of these creations in recent days have been coming to Max for Live (site | cdmu tag), taking advantage of the potent combination of Live as a host, third-party plug-in instruments as sound sources, and Max’s own capabilities with sequencing and sound. But it would be a mistake to see this as a phenomenon limited to Max for Live. Other development efforts, built in free tools, work from the ground up instead of the top down, and may use code in place of patches. These efforts are running in parallel, taking ideas from one another, responding to each other as a challenge. And that could make the coming months very interesting, indeed.

What’s exciting to me is that a set of ideas is emerging that may go beyond any one tool. Even past the grid, what we see is people beginning to refine the idea of live electronic performance into reusable, modular components. There is a greater sense than ever that what computer performance is treads a line between composition and live playing. At the heart of that concept is embodying both in an “application,” and making that application work on the grid.

7up 2.0 Arrives, in Max for Live

The biggest news is that 7up, the popular multi-page, multi-module performance app for the monome, is reaching a big new release. 7up 2.0 builds upon an earlier version written as a standalone application in Java.

Want to make a splash among the aficionados of digital sound? Releasing a software instrument emulating a broad collection of vintage digital synthesis chips from game and computer systems seems to do the trick. See my look at that software, and just as importantly, the chips that inspired it.

Within days of the release of Plogue’s Chipsounds, we have a couple of fair reviews of the new tool. Already got Chipsounds? Plogue’s David Viens has released screencasts showing you how to use it. Curious about other ways to explore vintage 8-bit sound? We’ve got that, too, in samples, hardware, and even SuperCollider code.

Reviews are in

Torley has an extensive video review – amazing stuff for something just days old – shown above. Gisle Martens Meyers has a review, too, on the blog Ugress. One complaint is that the plug-in is multi-timbral, rather than requiring different instances. In turn, automation is in the form of MIDI Control Changes, not parameters, since parameter automation really doesn’t deal with multi-timbral plug-ins. But all in all, you can get a lot from both reviews, plus a look at how the software works. There’s also a sense of where the software could go in future updates.

Plogue Chipsounds makes chiptune & video game sounds easy [Torley Lives]
Chipsounds Plugin Chip Sounds [Ugress]

The discussion of Chipsounds has also brought other efforts to resurrect vintage, 8-bit sounds.

Showcasing amazing projects is a good thing. But we know that no creation emerges fully-formed. They start from nothing, with lots of mistakes along the way. You get help and ideas from other people. And you need time.

So this month’s Handmade Music in Brooklyn we’re declaring an Open Lab. Got a kit lying on your shelf, waiting to get made? Got a half-finished project that needs fixing? Just want to hang around some musical and visual DIYers and see what they’re up to? And just need a few hours to make some progress? That’s the idea.

Software projects, hardware projects, gear hacking, circuit bending, coding, patching in Reaktor or Pd or Max – it’s all welcome.

We also have a very special guest this month in the form of Morgan Packard, a talented multi-instrumentalist and computer musician (video at top, with live visuals by superDraw creator Joshue Ott). At 7:30p, Morgan will show off his free Ripple musical environment, built on the powerful open source SuperCollider code-for-sound platform. It’s a great chance to see what SuperCollider can do, how a scratch-built environment can open up musical possibilities, and what you can do with Ripple yourself.

Full details: Handmade Music Brooklyn: Open Lab, Featuring Morgan Packard’s Musical Code [handmademusic@noisepages]

Facebook Event Page

The whole event runs 6:00p-11:00p at 3rd Ward Brooklyn. As always, it’s completely free. Be sure to bring your projects and the tools you’ll need; we can provide power, a PA, space, and other folks to hang out with. And we can help give you an excuse to set aside a few hours of time.

We’ll also be taking notes on how the setup works, as we know this may be something other Handmade Music events want to try in your neck of the woods.

The beauty of using touch for controllers is flexibility. Sure, you give up tactile feedback – but you can also quickly make your own layouts, make touch controllers an ideal complement to your existing hardware gear (the stuff with physical knobs and faders and pads).

For that reason, we’re all eagerly anticipating an upcoming version of the awesome OSC-based iPhone/iPod touch controller, TouchOSC.

http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

The included layouts are already fantastic, with rotaries and virtual buttons and multi-faders and toggles and X/Y pads. But custom control would be even better. Creator hexler writes CDM with the latest:

The long-awaited update to TouchOSC that will allow for custom layouts has just been submitted for review to Apple,
so I hope that as soon as next week it will be available as a free update to all users on the App Store.

Together with this release (1.3) there will be a free editor application to visually design and upload layouts to the device. You can take a look at the last beta version I published if you want, there’s both Windows and OS X versions available, but I will also prepare a Linux version as soon as possible, of course without the new version of TouchOSC this is but a preview of things to come:

http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-osx.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-win32.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-default-layouts.zip

And nicely enough, the editor is built in cross-platform Java, which I think makes a whole lot of sense. (Go Java, Python, etc., rather than getting stuck in hard-to-port platform-specific stuff like Cocoa.)

Thanks, hexler! I don’t have a video of the new features yet, so instead here’s a nice novelty – the beginnings of a creation using the free SuperCollider (which runs OSC natively) in combination with TouchOSC to make a custom step sequencer. Should fuel other ideas, too: