Hello Jakob,
On 13/3/19 1:36 am, Jakob Laue wrote:
What is your experience with algorithmic sound/melody generation in Pd? Do you know any algorithms? Have you heard of something or somebody who is doing a lot with algorithms in Pd?
Not an academic, but one particular technique has been very fruitful for me. It works like this:
Establish a set of notes you want to use. E.g. 4-6 notes from a scale.
Set some random percentage (0% to 100%) of the note set to be
null/rest note.
Create a random sequence of those notes e.g. 2 1 3 4 0
Have the sequence silently playing at several different rates over
and over. So e.g. at normal rate, double-rate, half-rate, 3x rate. The length of each note can correspond to the rate at which it's playing (e.g. double-rate note will be half as long, half-rate note will be twice as long) or fixed for a different feel.
- Now the trick is to have the sequence player randomly switch between
these different rate sequences. So e.g. it might be playing the normal time track, then switch to the double-time track, then back to the normal, then to half, and this should be done randomly. It's good to stick with one rate for a few notes so make the switcher not too aggressive.
If you do this for a few bars and then loop the result you will get some nice melodic loops.
Playing with the note length live is a fun thing to do - set up a MIDI knob to control the note length of each note (either as a percentage of the default note length or as an absolute value) and then twiddle between a short pizzicato sound and a longer note. This can have a big effect on the mood.
I sometimes use this algorithm in real time on drum beats as well - manually switching normal, half, double-time versions of the beat - it's very pleasant to tinker with.
To educated musicians this may sound very naïve but I have found the mood of a melody to be highly influenced by the initial note selection and the rate of play.
In particular the mood "floating in the hybrid airship through the forest canopy to the treehouse algorave with lasers guiding the way" can be evoked with a simple modern mixolydian square-wave arpeggio and a little reverb.
Some of these techniques can be heard on the album I just released:
https://chr15m.bandcamp.com/album/hacksilver
See the liner notes for details of the technology I used (including Pd).
Cheers,
Chris.