A new audio toy is online. Click here to play with it in your browser. Above is an action video.
For the past few months, I’ve been developing a DSP library in HaXe programming language which can target Adobe Flash (ActionScript), C++ and JavaScript code (and others). It has high quality oscillators filters and all sorts of useful UGens within it and I’m planning to open source it sometime in the future. Now that it is in a more or less working state, I’ve decided to build some instruments that use it and Otomata is one of them.
The Idea:
Otomata is a generative sequencer. It employs a cellular automaton type logic I’ve devised to produce sound events.
Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, left. at each cycle, the cells move themselves in the direction of their internal states. If any cell encounters a wall, it triggers a pitched sound whose frequency is determined by the xy position of collision, and the cell reverses its direction. If a cell encounters another cell on its way, it turns itself clockwise.
This set of rules produces chaotic results in some settings, therefore you can end up with never repeating, gradually evolving sequences. Go add some cells, change their orientation by clicking on them, and press play, experiment, have fun.
If you encounter something you like, just press “Copy Piece Link” and save it somewhere, or better, share it!
12 Comments
Nice job. This is probably one of the first useful (ie. musical) implementations of seen of cellular automata.
Cheers.
very musical tool!
awesome job!
Wow, this is really quite cool; I can’t wait for it to be open-sourced, I’d love to learn / play more with it.
This is very fun to play with, but could the performance be improved? It has pretty severe stuttering on netbooks.
Hey, if you need any testers for the MIDI version, let me know!
Also, feature request time
1) User definable width/height (could stay a square, or not, either way)
2) Definable key
3) For midi version, able to define certain pieces as triggering certain channels (1-16), and/or having different sides of the bounding square trigger different channels
4) Diagonals?
I just discovered this and am 100% obsessed with it now. Can’t wait to see some more stuff like this from you, and some more functionality for this instrument itself. Would love to see the ability to save and load presets, alter pitch, speed, tempo, volume, etc., as well as be able to fiddle with the settings of the reverberating notes and use various simulations of musical instruments if possible. Even if you never add anything more, though, this is already one of the coolest little web programs I’ve ever seen.
I enjoyed this so much I needed to know how it worked, so I wrote one in JavaScript. I expanded a bit for some features I would have liked to have seen, like grid sizing, scale changes, and tempo variations. Anyone interested in tinkering, feel free to contribute.
this is awesome!
How about adding some velocity options? Blue square = 1x, yellow square equals 2x, red square = 3x (ect). Implement a physics engine to exchange velocity after impact. Velocities/colors could be quantized to keep it locked on beat or they could be set to “free form” to created truly bizarre interactions.
love this musical tool, lovely. anything that can make these nice sequenced sounds is always good in my book. and am really looking forward the ios version for my Padi
lewis edwards
——
smokingbunny.co.uk
Very good sequencer/sound generator, I love the evolutive patterns it can provide !! I bought the Iphone on apple store, too bad it’s not compatible to send the sound too speakers via bluetooth (other audio applications do it), maybe you will make an upgrade to make it compatible ?? It would be also very cool to have a live playlist mode, to remix différent presets on the fly, in addition to a master tempo optional feature (all the loaded presets would be at the same tempo, selected at master tempo button if it is on…), and at least, it would be very cool to programm our own custom scales and have a transpose feature to change master tone. I’m ready to buy this add on !!!
Wonderfull, geat sounding instrument, very inspiring.
Thanks
13 Trackbacks
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