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Nodal Rhythm Developments

An experiment using Max/MSP playing a circular pattern of sounds. The distance between two nodes determines the time taken to go from one to the other.

A couple of things make this Vid a little confusing to watch. The frame rate can’t keep up with the position a lot of the time – take it from me the pattern remains the same: 1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>repeat… etc. Also the tempo sometimes changes without the nodes changing position. This is because there is a master time multiplier off screen which i’m using to scale the speed. The relative times of the nodes stay the same. Also it’s hard to see the connections between the nodes on the video, that’s youtube’s video compression. Oh yeah and then there is the yellow marker who just sits there doing nothing, that’s my lazy programming.

Anyway if you like the sounds of machines starting up or spinning down you might like this.

Leafcutter John x.

p.s. and i nearly forgot to mention that if you want to try out some nodal music there are several free applications available to do this. I’ve not played with them much so i’m not sure what they are like to use.

Tiction Is quite similar in appearance to my program though it’s more fully developed. Mac, Win, & Linux.

Nodal is a fairly deep “generative software application for composing music” Mac only.

Tags: beat, Generative, Max/MSP, nodal, node, rhythm

Generative nodal rhythms and melody in Max/MSP

I seem to be having a very intense Max/MSP week. Last night I was thinking about interesting ways of generating rhythm. In particular how to create structures which balance recognisable loops with random choices. Saw a really interesting page of flash design pieces which gave me the idea of using a nodal structure with one sound mapped to each node. 

In the first incarnation of my software (shown in the video above) the nodes fire out midi messages when they are hit by the red marker. The midi messages go to Logic Audio and play specific samples in a soft-sampler. The connections between nodes are created automatically. The rules are very simple. The marker must move on every beat (a regular pulse) it may only move to another node to which it is connected. The connections are directional so if the connection goes A to B the marker cannot move B to A unless another connection is made in that direction. If a node is connected to more than one node a random choice of the available targets is made. As the video progresses I randomly add more connections which increases the number of patterns available.

The Video below shows a later development of the software where the node locations are positioned by hand. Connections between them are also made by hand. The rules remain the same. In this example there are two discrete systems with two markers. As the video progresses the systems are linked. Again the nodes trigger midi messages which this time trigger piano note samples. I built in probability to this version so fore example you can connect A to B three times and A to C once. Which would make A to B three times more likely to occur than A to C. The connections with stronger pink lines have stronger probabilities. Note that some of the nodes are ‘rest’ nodes and produce no sound.

The output from these systems can become a little monotonous after a while due to the lack of volume dynamics and the regular pulse. All the same I’m very pleased with my days work. I’m hoping to be able to build some of these ideas into the new version of Forester…

Hope you enjoy,

Leafcutter John x.

Tags: beat, Generative, Max/MSP, nodal, node, rhythm