compusition

I finally turned one of my many half-finished pieces into something complete that I like enough to share with the world. I think the key was forcing myself to come up with a very structured plan for how the piece will work, staying focused and working on it regularly. You can listen to "The Mirror" over here.

Version 0.8.1 of ajm objects for Max/MSP is now available.

This release upgrades to JRuby 1.1.2 and fixes a few minor issues.

I want to make new music but I keep getting distracted. So I compensate by publishing older music on this site. I'm glad someone else will get to hear these. Now they won't die a lonely death on an old hard drive.

I often find it easier to understand what I'm hearing when I can see a visual representation of the music. This has become more important as I've been experimenting with generative music. I'm starting to give up full control over the composition process and it's not always clear what the results are without a lot of repeated listens.

Now that I have that latest release of ajm objects off my back and the Ruby support is pretty solid, I hope I can find time to publish a nice set of example Ruby scripts for Max on this site. You will find them under my Max/MSP software page.

First up: how to process a Jitter matrix using Ruby

I am happy to announce version 0.8 of ajm objects for Max/MSP.

This release takes the embedded Ruby support from "proof of concept" to being quite usable and useful.

Now that I have a pretty stable environment for running Ruby inside Max/MSP, I'm trying to figure out what to actually do with it.

I've been wanting to learn more about generative/evolutionary algorithms, and Ruby seems like a great language for exploring these concepts in a semi-interactive way. I stumbled across this Ruby Gem called DRP the other day: http://drp.rubyforge.org/

Learn more about a dark period of my life, and the computer music that resulted, from my description of the piece Side Effects may Include.

I uploaded some more images to my Visual Compusitions area. Check it out!

Follow up to my previous post on sequencer design. After a lot of back and forth I think I've finally pinned down what I want to do with this project. The key to making this system interesting is to make it "self sequencing". I already have patterns that consist of many tracks of sequenced rhythms, notes, velocities, and durations. That's what every commercial sequencer does so it's not too exciting. So I added a hierarchical meta-sequencer that sequences the sequencer. It's only 2-levels deep (so far), but that seems plenty complex for the time being.