Algorithmic Composition

Ive been working on this patch for the past six months and I thought some of you may be interested in it if your trying to learn Pure Data...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD0Boaq-Zfk

The patch it self analyzes transitions between events and uses this to make weighted random decisions to generate alternative sequence's. The idea was to have a patch that would generate music in a style that was dictated by the user by playing ideas into it. Dunno how well it does this but its quite fun to play around on!

download

I don't know what Pure Data is, but this is pretty tight.

yeah it was made by one of the core developers of max/msp. neat idea, the implementation looks very usable and it sounds pretty nice! did you implement anything regarding greater song structure or does it flow through markov generated sequences?

can you recommend anything for learning pd? I use bidule but I've been thinking about getting into it, seems like there might be more features/stability since it's older.

Thanks! Yeah PD's the poor mans Max, just as good in its own way though ;) nah I haven't done anything for greater song structure, it was something I thought about, and at some point I may look at, but I just ran out of time. So when the markov chain gets going its left to its devices to come up with what ever it wants... :)

Learning PD I found it easier coming from max. I think the Max/MSP documentation is online and in it is some really good tutorials, check out some peoples patches on the PD forums and mailing list and reading Miller Puckette's book "the theory and technique of electronic music" is always a good start!

Yeah it doesn't have ALL the same MSP objects but it has enough so that there is usually a workaround, sometimes they just have different names, or you have to put together something your self but where theres a will theres a way!

Very cool video. Thanks for sharing!

Nicely done. I used to ChucK back in the day (It's a great language by the way if you like coding.), so I'm super down with algorithmic composition. I had pd for a while, but just didn't have the time to invest in really wrapping my head around it. Perhaps someday soon.