Music for Knob Twiddlers

Generative Music is fun, cheap and freely available. If you're a techie and interested in music you'd be mad not to play with this stuff. I'm not so I did.

As a kid, the Moog synthesiser was an object of desire - a cross between a church organ and a 1950s telephone exchange. What could be better?

I liked the sound, but if I'm honest, it was the technology that interested me the most.
So years later, my curiosity in electronics and music has resurfaced. Sadly my musical ability is still lacking and the keyboard is as elusive as ever.

Solution: Take a Generative Music (MIDI) app and a software synthesiser that accepts MIDI and away you go. In the video below I've used Nodal to create music in MIDI format and pump the resulting MIDI stream into a software synthesiser: MULAB.

Nodal & MU LABS

Nodal is a very simple, graph based music generator. Each note is represented by a node and the vertices represent the time between notes. Nodes may be connected to multiple nodes and you decide if the exit points are sequential, parallel, or random. You can build a number of separate graphs which output on separate MIDI channels. So you'll need a soft-synth that can handle multiple MIDI input channels. That excludes apps like Garage Band for example.

I've used MULAB as the synth as it can easily be configured to handle multiple MIDI input channels.

MULAB ships with a free soft-synth that supports a large number of synths and sound effects. It's easy to set up and use.
I've used sound flower to record the output and generate the video. Unfortunately I've used a relatively low resolution video - I'll change it next time.

Having rekindled my interest in music, I'm off on the next adventure:  Intermorphic's Noatikl. This is a much more complex environment than Nodal - more to follow.

If you've got a favourite Generative Music app then please let me know.