A 3.5 minute excerpt of the fully generative, never repeating music composition system for Universal Everything's V&A Forever installation in the John Madejski garden of the Victoria & Albert Museum London (Nov 2008 - Feb 2009).

The music was composed in realtime (in Java/OpenAL) using a custom developed generative system which strategically picked instruments from a library of approx. 250 single-note base samples, designed by Simon Pyke (@freefarm). These samples are then algorithmically arranged in real time into polyrhythms, chords, melodies of varying densities & intensities. All of these rhythms, chord progressions, the melodic phrases themselves, repetitions, transpositions, key & tempo changes are entirely generative & evolving, using a variety of techniques. E.g. cellular automata are playing a central role to generate multitimbral and polyrhythmic melodies/phrases, which then are randomly mutated to produce key changes and entirely new variations over time. The overall tempo of the composition was varied between ~65 - 130 bmp via layered (additive) sine waves, similar to the concept of a biorhythm, creating a larger soft arc/transition to a more up-beat character towards the end of the installation (after 2+ months).

I developed a custom GUI tool to allow Simon and me to define the macro configuration of the composition system, assign individual metadata for each of the 250 instruments/samples (e.g. pitch/octave ranges, min/max tempos, tags, usage probabilities at certain times, group associations, exclusions with other instruments). It took ~5 months of daily fine tuning and listening to hundreds of hours of generated outputs to create this composition system. Yet, once the installation was live, an entirely new & different (within the parameters) composition resulted and so put us on equal footing with any other visitor/listener.

Project documentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ988B5vlyo

Generative music composition system & algorithms: Karsten Schmidt.
Sound design: Simon Pyke.
Creative direction: Matt Pyke

V&A Forever Excerpt

Context: http://media.thi.ng/2014/talks/we-are-the-incanters/index.html

Recording of the Sonic-PI livecoding demo given at Retune 2014 conference (slightly extended with extra synth stacks after the conf). Sourcecode here:
https://gist.github.com/postspectacular/d9c951efb166a2e82f53

Check out Sonic-PI yourself, it's amazing!
http://sonic-pi.net

Sonic - Pi - Retune14

For the all the people @ Resonate 2015, keeping the spirit alive... (made on the plane/return flight home) Unmastered & best listened to under headphones or big/decent speakers (laptop likely to sound bad, sorry)!

Resonate 2015

Thank you, Portland, for an amazing 2 weeks!

<a href='https://theartistunion.com/tracks/3869c3'>Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

Free Download

20170227 - PDX

20170501 - mayday

Spending a few days in Frankfurt, the city which introduced me to electronic music 25 years ago... So this is an homage to Eye-Q, Sven, Ralf, Torsten et al, with a little tear in my eye

20170509 - FFM (edit)

20170512 - intermission

20170515 - xpander

20170730 - highgate

20170801 - slowdown

20170909 - dolomiti

Happy b'day @arcticnoah!

<a href='https://theartistunion.com/tracks/3530a7'>Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

20170915 - sixteen

Photo: Tony Webster (CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

20171005 - elegy

20171013 - substrata

20171208 - nowhere

20171227 - overcome

20180207 - equilibrium

Been working on something different / new direction as part of @forthcharlie & thi.ng/synstack research... Granular synthesis, time slicing, generative sequencing & layering, filters, erosion, AI voice samples

20180922 - machine learning

Recording of my first live jam w/ VCV Rack (https://vcvrack.com) and Ableton... forgive the lack of proper mixing

20181020 - modular diary 001

a brief Saturday break well spent: Modular Diary 002 @vcvrack (basses & bleeps) + @ableton + @kv331synthmaster

Modular Diary 002

20181027 - (semi) modular diary 002

quick weekend sketch to be developed further...

20181104 - sketch (excerpt)

20190530 - Venus/Manomine

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157625235467871

B-110-8-32-0.8500-sin

G-47-8-3-0.8500-saw

G-47-8-32-0.8500-saw

H-110-8-32-0.8500-tri

T-110-8-32-0.8500-square

Image based granular synthesis (stereo support, up to 768 grain oscillators (3*8bit RGB), flexible grain envelopes, feedback, various waveforms) developed with toxiclibs:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157625235467871
http://toxiclibs.org/


V-288-5-6-0.9500-sin

Image based granular synthesis (stereo support, filters with LFO, up to 768 grain oscillators (3*8bit RGB), flexible grain envelopes, feedback, various waveforms) developed with toxiclibs:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157625235467871
http://toxiclibs.org/


H-47-8-32-0.8500-lp

N-47-6-24-0.8500-filtermod

Channelling some positive energy to counter darkness descending onto UK after their plebiscite/suicide result...

Partially made with samples created via https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/ramp-synth/

20191213 - blinding darkness

This goes out to my amazing family, friends, supporters, patreons, open source contributors... thank you, thank you!

Now, let's all try to make 2021 less of a sub-basement of hell kind of affair... ✌️

20201224 - twentytwenty

Here's to a more positive, peaceful, progressive and less pandemic 2021! Stay healthy, stay home, be good!

20201231 - twentytwentyone

(Re)searcher of human endeavours, DIY synth, electronic music connoisseur, producer since 1993

toxi

Popular tracks