Metasepia 12″ by Don’t DJ

July 31, 2016

Metasepia by Don’t DJ

Musician Don’t DJ uses the Euclidean Pattern Generator in his music. A record was released and I became involved.

It’s been about five years since I posted anything in this blog, so this is a nice opportunity to try and bring it back to life.

Travel By Goods

Last year artist Thomas Baldischwyler contacted me. He runs the Hamburg based Travel By Goods record label and was to release a record by Berlin musician Florian Meyer under his artist name Don’t DJ. From Thomas I learned that Florian uses the Euclidean Pattern Generator in his music. Not only to produce music in the studio, but also to perform live on stage!

Euclidean Pattern Generator 1.1 – OSC support

September 25, 2011

Pure Data OSC test patch

Summer is at it’s end and it’s time to do some programming again. The Euclidean rhythms application I made earlier this year still has a lot of potential for new functionality, so here is the new version 1.1.

The main new feature in this version is support for Open Sound Control (OSC). After the last version a great offer came from programmer Michael Heuer to collaborate and add OSC support to the application. So this part of the program is very much his work. You can view more of his projects on GitHub.

Euclidean MIDI Patterns

May 22, 2011

Screenshot

In January I posted a Euclidean rhythm generator in Flash. Polyrhythms generated by a mathematical algorithm. I wanted the next version to be able to send MIDI, so I could use it with software like Ableton Live and hardware music machines like my Elektron Machinedrum.

Since Flash doesn’t do MIDI I spent the last few months learning Java and rebuilt the pattern generator to add MIDI capabilities.

Euclidean rhythms update

May 20, 2011

E(5, 13) pattern

There’s an error in the Euclidean rhythms generator I posted in January. A few days ago I got a comment by Thomas pointing out the app generates wrong patterns. And he’s absolutely right.

Here’s an updated version in which I rewrote the algorithm code. I checked it with several patterns and they all came out correct, so hopefully I have it right this time.

Audio Editor 1.1

February 20, 2011

Audio Editor 1.1

While cleaning up my laptop’s hard drive I found an update to the audio editor I posted here last year. Not radically different, but maybe useful to someone.

Its new feature is the loop function. Toggle the loop button and playback loops between the start marker (S) and the end marker (E). Just like you’d expect.

Next to this single new feature there’s a new waveform display that I really like.
In the old version the waveform shape was rendered by drawing vertical lines next to each other for each pixel from left to right. The new version draws a much nicer vector shape that is less processor intensive as well.

Euclidean rhythms

January 27, 2011

Euclidean patterns

Last week I read a really interesting article about computer generated rhythms: “Generating African rhythms using the euclidean algorithm” on Ruin & Wesen’s website. Usually I’m not so impressed by generative and algorithmic music, but this formula gives some very cool results.

Audio Editor 1.0

April 9, 2010

Audio Editor 1.0

A useful application!

I posted a lot of experimental stuff on this weblog over the past year. Or components that might have their use when built into proper applications. But this is my first web app that’s useful on it’s own.

This is a simple Flash audio editor that works in the browser. Everything it does is done by ActionScript code inside the application. There’s no backend that does the difficult work. So it would function just as well in the standalone Flash Player or exported as an Air application as it does in the browser.

Animation & audio synchronization

March 8, 2010

Sync test screenshot

It’s not that easy to synchronize programmed animation and dynamic sound in Flash. To have something happen on screen at exactly the same time a sound starts to play.

I thought about it a bit and came up with two different scenarios where audio and visuals need to be synchronized:

The first is where a sound plays and something visual on screen happens to accompany that audio event.
The second is the other way around. Something happens on screen that should be accompanied by a sound.

In the first case the animation is the initiator, in the second case the sound. For the second case I included a Flash example here with the source code available.

Augmented reality and sound

February 19, 2010

Flartoolkit

Yes I know, it’s the hype of 2009 and we’re in 2010 now, but I haven’t seen anything yet where augmented reality is combined with sound. If you do know examples of augmented reality and audio, please leave a comment. I’d love to see what other people do with it.

This is a small experiment I started half a year ago but never finished. I looked it up again last week because I needed a Flash AR example for a project at work. Here I improved it a bit to make it more presentable.

MP3 Wave Display 2

January 17, 2010

MP3 wave display is orange.

Wave Display 2 is an improved version of the last one (in the previous post). A few things had to be rewritten in the code for waveform rendering, and there were some extra features I wanted to include to make the application a bit more interesting to use.

The new features in this version:

Audio playback. You can now listen to the loaded MP3 file. Click ‘play mp3’ or press the SPACE bar to listen.
Draggable start and end locators to select only part of the sound. Drag the ‘S’ and ‘E’ locators to set the start and end point.
Reverse playback. Click the ‘reverse’ button to toggle reverse playback.
Adjustable playback speed. Drag the ‘transpose’ slider to change the playback speed. The speed is adjusted so that the pitch changes from one octave down to one octave up in semitone steps.
Drag to zoom. Press and drag the mouse on the display area for finer control: Drag vertical to zoom and horizontal to move the waveform. I always really liked this behaviour in Steinberg WaveLab where I first saw it, and where I now copied it from.