generative

A musical interpretation of pi.  All pitches, durations, and note velocities are based on the digits of pi.  Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNpab2PDquw

This composition was recently featured on NPR's "Engines of Our Ingenuity" from the University of Houston, Episode 3030: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi3030.htm

100 Seconds of Pi

3m31

second day of fiddling around with sonicpi. subway. #learningallthethings 

the code behind it can be found here: https://github.com/euruband/sonic-pi-examples/blob/master/berlin

twitter.com/codeplusberlin

Deviations From The Average III is the 11th track from NetWorks 2: Phase Portraits, the entire album can be heard on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. or purchased on Bandcamp: shawnbell.bandcamp.com/album/network…ase-portraits

Constraints on the connections and interactions between the entities of systems are central to what defines them. This is true of the interactions between the entities that make up matter, cells, societies, ecosystems, planetary systems and so on. It is also true for games and art. Constraints are what define, and how we recognize, musical genres and are key in the process of creation.

“Deviations From The Average III” is an example of the diverse, self-organizing musical forms that information sharing over simple networks can produce. NetWorks represents six years of programming and tuning a network of 64 nodes that share music performance data including pitch, duration, velocity, and entry delay (entry delays result in rhythmic patterns, motives and larger scale structures such as phrases and sections). Articulations such as legato, staccato, etc., as well as pedalling and various synthesis parameters are also often determined by the network.

NetWorks has been “tuned” to generate patterns at "the edge of chaos,” that is, balanced between variety and harmony (through repetition, for example). Although not explicitly programmed, one can often hear motives that repeat, vary, develop into melodies, diverge and return, all through the simple interactions between nodes. If constraints define genre, NetWorks is a search for new genres and cross-genres. To modify a phrase of Christopher Langton’s (a pioneer in the field of Artificial Life), NetWorks is the study of “music-as-it-could-be.”

The approach taken to mapping the patterns to sound is to ensure their clarity, not to obfuscate them by complex synthetic textures or other effects readily available during mixing, for example by applying an echo effect. No notes were harmed in the mixing of these pieces! Since the music of NetWorks is self-organizing, sampled instruments were often chosen to include the “human touch.”

The NetWorks network of 64 nodes is infinitesimally minuscule compared to natural networks, and six years of “tuning” and exploring some of its possible architectures and their musical potential is hardly a beginning. The sounds chosen to manifest the musical patterns discovered by the network attempt to reflect the mystery and wonder that virtually unlimited diversity can come from such small beginnings and such simple models of interaction.

"Phase Portraits" is good for focused listening, ambience, a background for work, mediating and falling asleep. A decent pair of headphones is recommended for focused listening.

Album artwork evolved using SBart4 by Unemi Tatsuo.

NetWorks 2: Phase Portraits

Deviations From The Average III

An extract based on live coded performance using Sonic Pi given on http://www.livecoding.tv/josephwilk. No post production.

Work in progress. 

Musical Source code:
https://github.com/repl-electric/live-coding-space/tree/master/destination/instance_eval

nil.instance_eval{not nil} [Live coded]

Leaving

So, another try at making something new in Pure Data that responds and makes something in a generativeish fashion based on a computers perception of pitch and dynamics audible to it in its environment for a certain time. A  patch was made from scratch, where various dynamic and pitch ranges of the incoming audio signal were analyzed and divided into certain ranges, each range having different mathematical variables and operations and so on.The values were then turned into values between -1 and 1 to be written into the array, representing the score and audio source material for this....No oscilliatores used this time either. Creative freedom was then taken with making the apparatus to read the score and source file, and a gentle mix of custom samplers,filters, and such were implemented.This track is based on three such takes from thisprogram, assembled into one because it felt rigth. 



Swamps Up Nostrils - Three memory holes

Art is plastic thought. A swing between ideas and aesthetics

generative

Fran Simó