This piece marries two pieces of software with a live flute player. The first patch is a generative drum machine and sequencer which can be set to randomly add notes in a logical fashion. The second is an eight-track recorder, in which each track can be played back at varying speeds. Both patches traverse the separation between non-rhythmic, melodic and purely rhythmic sounds. This characteristic is shared by instruments such as the flute, which can be played highly rhythmically (and in some cases, as a percussion instrument), but also purely tonally.
The generative drum machine works by allowing the user to input binary sequences on each of eight tracks via an eight by eight pad of buttons. These sequences represent whether or not the track is playing at a particular instant. The sequencer continually cycles through the pattern of note ons and note offs. The sequencer can then be made to randomly turn sequencer notes on and off in a controlled random fashion. A 32-input analog controller is used to set four parameters per track, which set the probability and distance of turning on a note from one that is on. For example, if on the first track, the first note was on, and the user set the horizontal "jump" distance to two and probability to .3, then at each time step the notes two to the left and right of the first note would turn on with probability .3. Similarly, if the horizontal jump distance for the first track was set to one with probability one, then each note that was on on the first track would always spawn a note at the same timing location on the 2nd and 8th tracks. This system is equally well-suited to randomly morph a drum pattern and to create slowly changing arpeggios.
The recorder is a basic eight-track device with which the playback speed of each track can be varied. The controls for each track are mapped onto a row of an eight by eight button pad, so that each track can be set to record or playback at 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, one, two, three, and four times the recording speed. User-input changes to the state (record or playback) of each track as well as the playback speed are quantized to each record track's length. To combine the recorder and generative sequencer, each sequencer track determines whether or not each recorder track is playing at a particular instance. In this setup, each recorder track has a length corresponding to one sequencer time step. This forces the recorder into highly rhythmic patterns. However, when the system is in an environment with some kind of acoustic feedback, it begins to act more like a very complicated delay and reverb, making it much less apparently rhythmic.
The piece attempts to explore the rhythmic and non-rhythmic aspects of each software component and instrument in a linear progression. First, the flute player plays a series of percussive sounds, including those made by the keys of the flute. These sounds are recorded and sequenced. The flute player then transitions into playing sequences of short melodic notes which correspond to first 5 recursive major fifths of a root. For example, for the root D#, the flute player would play the notes D#, A#, F, C, and G. In this way, varying the playback speed of the recorded notes by a factor of 3 or 1/3 does not add any new notes, except for an additional D in our example. The flute player then transitions to playing longer notes outside of a sequence. At this point of the piece, reverb, compression, and saturation are added to the recorder's output to help ease the system into feedback. As the flute player's notes become longer, the system is set to feedback more and more until the flute player stops playing and the system simply feeds back on itself. The effects are then dialed out and the sound decays to nothing. The end result is a full exploration of the possibilities of an instrument to act percussively and melodically as well as the interaction between an acoustic instrument and a complex computer system.
A ChucK source file which implements the recorder and generative sequencer can be found here. Here is an Ableton Live set which allows mixing of the effected and uneffected recorder signals. Note that in addition to the requisite software, the user must have monome and ooscc compatible devices. Here is a readme (a copy of this file).