patchlore @paul@post.lurk.org

I've decided to publish a version of my rejected PhD project proposal on my wiki, and place it under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Enjoy!

https://pbat.ch/wiki/CATFMAS/

Okay. It's live. introducing: the candy crystal rainbow codex: https://pbat.ch/codex/

And the code: https://git.sr.ht/~pbatch/codex

more transmissions to come.

Okay so #introductions

Hello. I'm @paul. I'm a musical hacker and sound designer interested in teaching computers how to sing. I spend most of my time working on software projects related to the field of computer music.

Some topics that amuse me:

#linux
#dsp
#audio
#maille
#mead
#grids
#monome
#android
#generative
#HCI
#powersoftwo
#pixelart
#demoscene
#livecoding
#zen
#mechanicalkeyboards
#art?
#music?

My website: pbat.ch
My mirror website (hosted on GH): paulbatchelor.github.io

After months of delay, here's a tutorial on building programs for the monome grid in C using libmonome:

https://pbat.ch/wiki/grid_tutorial/

The tutorial works incrementally, with the final program looking like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fkgf5fTMpc

Still a WIP, but the overall structure is there.

Fun fact: it is indeed possible to build a musical instrument on Android using only C and Makefiles: https://github.com/paulbatchelor/vocshape

Using Gest to produce 3-part isorhythmic harmony.

Ended the evening turning two FM oscillators into 2-part melodic isorhythmic counterpoint. Humming the beginnings of a third voice which I'll add on top of everything else tomorrow. Very satisfying stuff.

I quickly ran into a clock drift problem trying to run multiple gestures at once with Gest. So today was the day I implemented the measures to prevent clock drift over long periods of time. AKA the thing that would separate this effort from all my other previous efforts at line generators and complex rhythm sequencers. Very make-or-break moment.

The two ways I've thought about preventing clock drift were localizing any drift to phrases and doing a hard reset at the start of a new phrase, and then doing gradual "course corrections" every time a new beat occurs.

While very initial, it seems that drift localization doesn't have any perceptual effect on gesture production, and course correction does seem to improve accuracy somewhat (based on my ad-hoc testing with printf at least).

Something I've wanted to do with SDFs (2d in particular, if it matters) is to be able to interpolate between SDF-defined geometries in time.

Like, for example, some kind of square that morphs to a circle. Or a triangle that morphs into a 5-point star. Etc. Etc.

I'd be very surprised if there was a generalized method for approaching this. But maybe there are hints for how one could think about this?

I made a little notation language for making gestures in Gest:

"beg 3 3 t 60 sg pr 2 t 63 sg t 60 gl
pr 3 t 62 sg t 60 sg t 59 gl end loop fin"

produces the gesture used to control pitch below.

It's only a small abstraction above the low-level commands used to populate gestures, but it sure will save some keystrokes!

Took a peak at the Tidal Cycles documentation (as one does occasionally), and it turns out that the notion of a "cycle" in Tidal is very similar to what I guess would be referred to as a "phrase monoramp" in Gest.

https://tidalcycles.org/docs/reference/cycles

Much debugging today, and what do I have to show for it? A sequenced melody that's a rip-off of the rite of spring being performed quite poorly on an FM oscillator. Baby steps in the right direction.

attempting to printf my way out of this mess

I couldn't resist. Gest now has exponential and bezier behavior. With Gest capable of drawing step, linear, exponential, and bezier line segments, it now officially has equivalent functionality to my old libline library, but better:

https://pbat.ch/wiki/gest/
https://pbat.ch/proj/libline/

Gest also uses proportional rhythms similar to an even older project of mine called Prop (a rhythmic notation system). I've got a ways to go before I can do some of the stuff found in there, but it is very very close:

https://pbat.ch/proj/prop.html

both prop and libline failed for the same reasons (clock drift), which Gest addresses (and fixes) via using a phasor as an external clock signal.

I'm really excited to begin exploring melodic counterpoint again, only this time wielding gesture!

I felt the need to add some glissando behaviors to my gesture sequencer because of all the pitch sequencing I was doing.

I've added two kinds of glissando behavior. A regular gliss that performs glissando in the last half of the note, and a small more subtle gliss that only does glissando in the last 10% of the note. Both use cubic slope.

The demo below showcases both glissando behaviors.

Where the beats have no name.

Feeling inspired by the "Sonic Entomologist" Disquiet Juno Project entries:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0498-sonic-entomologist/