Beauty in the Substrate

This is a collection of ongoing experiments with new musical interfaces. In each of the examples below, I’m playing with ways of giving an electronic musician more expressive and “higher-level” control of his or her music. The idea is to step above the level of an individual note and instead allow a musician to shape something bigger, such as overall timbre, pitch space, harmonic rhythm, rhythmic density, and so on. The best way to go about this, I believe, is to link musical events or gestures to something more complex than a knob or a piano key.

With that goal in mind, these projects all use the concept of a network (or graph) as the source for musical shape. My intent is to produce interesting, complex music based on a network’s layout.

Tiction is the most complete example. Each node represents a sonic event – a note, the adjustment of some parameter, or both – and building networks of nodes lets you create arbitrarily complex sequences of events. Tiction lets a musician quickly build fascinating polyrhythms and ever-changing effects.

Fleeting is just a Processing sketch at the moment, but will eventually become a fun interface to Reaktor’s Grainstates.

Rotator is also a Processing sketch, but it will soon become an interesting way to route audio through a filter bank.