Space Monkeys: Working with experimental Reaktor ensembles

great Jim. I like the Soundstreamer... there was also might be something with GingerBread in the title here at the U/L.

i attached a random composition from QuasiFractal in a zip.... you can have a quick try.

here it shows better how to start....

import the quasifractal.mid from the zip 2 times. 1st on track 1 which has all 16 midi tracks in a single midi. (in the clip properties set it to send all midi channels to midi channel 1)

then import again quasifractal.mid with the other option so its also available as individual mutlitrack midi - seen below on tracks 2-17

note... on track one the green fx is kontakt piano, just for monitoring while listening through it.
i think its at 240bpm. I didn't listen yet but there is something cool looking where the red bar is on the 3rd track down.

if its discordant you can use key snap, maybe quantize etc...

it takes 2 seconds to render these, so you can even save 100's and just scan through them visual for interesting moments.

once you find some nice parts, you try different synths/instruments/drums/virtual vox on all the individual midi lines
or run some gens, have a jam, sing etc...

one thing i do is always keep that original single midi with all the tracks, and then its available, because some percussion or instruments like a piano that have full range and short decay can use all the notes from all the channels and still sound ok.

 

When discussing fractals in music, don't forget about bytebeat. The results are not chaotic, but certainly unpredictable, and exhibiting multi-level self-similarity. When visualised, they often look a lot like a Sierpinsky Gasket as well.

 

yeah, ByteBeats are awesome aswell. more music by formula! ....there are some in-web-page bytebeat experimentation tools available and also formula generators... worth adding to the list....cheers Col.

 

also its sort of related... there have been several projects already that have been setup to regenerate compositions from famous composers works. And they work!

this gives me the idea that if you take 50 good human selected fractals and feed them into this machine. it can output infinite variations.

or if a prolific composer reached 20 major pieces they could input thier works and just generate the rest. Or at least get variations from which to launch from.. kind of cool catalyst.

i would really like to input the 1000's of beats i programmed over the years and just have a folder of 1000's new ones... now. that would be awesome!

 

There's an 'in-Reaktor' bytebeat experimentation tool as well - search the UL for bytebeat.

As far as other fractal based tools, I would really like to find a way to generate audio fractals that can create the same wonder in sound as they can visually, but so far nothing has even got close. I think a large part of this is related to the approach that is taken - it's a mapping/translation approach. Trying to take raw fractal data and apply a set of music rules to it.

One of the things about fractals is that elements on all levels of scale are all related to each other beautifully, but the process of generating the image produces local data that doesn't have any obvious value - the value is emergent at a large scale, but requires a fine level of detail to remain coherent, and any mapping is incredibly simple and so doesn't get in the way of the fractal. I think much of the work in fractal music is trying to convert the data from the process at some arbitrary level and apply a set of music rules to it. Trying to get it to sound a bit like 'real' music. Nobody complains that Julia sets don't look enough like a Rembrandt or a Picasso!
Imagine if someone generated a Mandelbrot fractal, but instead of colouring every pixel precisely depending on the escape time of the iteration process, they processed character sized chunks, and then turned them into artificial simulated brush strokes, of various colours chosen based on a statistical analysis of Picasso paintings - It's never going to look as good as a proper Mandelbrot... and it still won't look like a Picasso either.

 

OMG. Black MIDI. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/black-midi

Conlon Nancarrow's offspring will inherit the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow

 

'Black Midi' takes me back to Frank Zappa's 'The Black Page' (here as performed by his son and friends, 'Zappa Plays Zappa'), similarly named for it's lack of 'white' space due to density of written musical notes:



FZ was heavily influenced/enamored with Nancarrow, though this piece is certainly showing his taste for Edgard Varèse).

I have certainly made some 'black midi in my time, though never thought to upload it to youtube (mainly because youtube didn't exist yet hehe)

I am momentarily distracted by audio interface problems/replacement but would at least briefly contribute to the conversation the concept of the more abstract Reaktor ensembles as 'exciters'...by that I mean using them as the impulses to drive various spectral/modeling tools like Madrona Labs 'Kaivo', 2C Audio's 'Kaleidoscope', and Zynaptiq's 'Morph 2.

Basically, the ensemble (for example 'Skrewell, to cite a recognizable example) functions as a noise source, a 'chaotic oscillator-like scraper/bow' to 'excite' a then following spectral process/modeling engine. Actually, the base (and best IMHO) sounds of Metaphysical Function make great use of the concept by feeding it's unlocked oscillator metamixes into the 'Resochord' built-in FX.

I just take that 'Metaphysical Function' concept to include entire sessions/recordings of Reaktor 'generators' into other, 3rd party engines for similar 'scapes' and avant garde 'pedal tones'/drones to provide a courser 'grain' to the spectral texture thus produced (like adding salt to watercolors if anyone here paints).

Only days ago I was using a heavily CC modulated 'Entropic Florine' (hope I got the name right?) to drive 'Kaleidoscope' for the layering library to feed some future avant garde virtual jam. It sounded like a waterphone played by a constantly turning/tuning radio dial (take that AMM )

ok, back to shopping for a new interface ;-) Any opinions on the Apogee Symphony I/O system? (love it's modularity)

 

Loopy I like your reminder that the exciter, resonator and body of the instrument, although they're all present within a single guitar or violin, can also be spread across multiple pieces of software and/or hardware, and spread out across time as well, with successive layers of processing.

The whole studio is the instrument. And as Cal has pointed out, the finished product can return to the beginning of the cycle for a new round of de- and re-creation. Our ouroboros. May it eat well.

In other words, play what thou wilt, that shall be the whole of the law. Or as Debussy said, when he was asked, "Sir, what rules of harmony do you follow?":

"My own pleasure."

 

here is a screenshot of a really amazing chaos project...

http://www.umbah.co.uk/Reaktor/chaosproject.jpg

i have a lot of gens and this is how i test them out...

you can see the orange regions.... these are the more chill sections. generated with slower drums and different gens from the grey ones.
note the order of the numbers on the grey regions ....how much shuffling of the regions went on to get stuff that flowed

you can see the fractal midi piano

.. and the chromatic stutter

and most obviosly the 1000's of audio clips from the gens.

and note how everything is scaled up... those red markers are track markers... so thats half an album there all generated at once...

 

Cal, that image is stunning. And a little bit scary, but scary in a good way.

Can we hear the results of something like that somewhere?

Speaking of various approaches to generative music - I looked at Noatikl and Fractal Tune Smithy recently. The former I find completely baffling (although I know some people really like it) and the latter - oh my lord do I like it. Granted, it does exactly one thing (it composes midi tracks of fractal music, in an infinite variety of ways, and in any scale you want, any time signature, any set of rhythms, for as long as you want) and that one thing might or might not be what you wanted to do, but if it is, wow. Example here

What does it mean that the melody is fractal? It means that the seed melody repeats rapidly, and at moderate speed, and more slowly, and very very slowly, just as the shape of a fractal exists at all different levels of scale.

Cal, is that how you did the fractal midi piano part in that opus you posted a screen shot of?

 

I was really into this style of generative music some years ago. There used to be a number of free tools for windows that were fairly approachable. The pieces often sound unresolved, in a sense, to me. Still, I agree that they can be fun. I think that you end up doing more tonal exploration than "music composition", per se.

I have noatikl on the iPad, or whatever the iPad tool from them is called. I find it baffling. I've tried to spend some time with it but it was not approachable like the tools that I'm talking about were. My sense is that this kind of composition is more appropriate for a DSL (domain specific language) approach where you actually write the music in text using various transformation functions and assignment primitives. I'm sure that there have been numerous efforts in this regard, I just haven't spent any time lately looking for good examples.

 

Thank you for this ensemble Jim! I'm really enjoying what I'm getting from it. Was getting interesting results from "ginger" (Martin Brinkmann) too though I'm not really sure how that generates its notes. I'm going to try and create a piece with Soundstreamer as the only melodic source. I give some very unique happenings. (Maybe one day we'll have a series of fractal blocks )

 

cool fractal Christian! very relaxing, and naturaly flowing...

the screenshot project is here, depends how brave you are though! haha

but this project is very interesting for fractals.

some really complex fractal patterns from various different programs/generators and also i sampled a lot of bird calls and note how they just fit.. after it got me thinking this is how animals are 'coded' to sing. they use fractals.

its how fractals exist at all levels of scale, the self-similarity and how it plays out in music that is so interesting.

in Tune Smithy when a fractal generated is played at 3000bpm and you can still hear some patterns that make sense. thats wild!
every fractal program i tried seems to give different results. they all use different algorythms and probabilities and iterations to modify and generate new fractals...

i understand quite a lot from fractal art, and can sort of translate that world over to the music and composing and synths. It helps to visualise the way fractal formulas can be combined and also decombined, and also be aware that there are often points of interest within a mass of mediocrity that can be searched out and focused on, sometimes there is a very fine line to chaos and order, and on that line you find thats often where lies the magic.

you can see these points of interest straight away in art, but you have to listen through with music, or better still, be able to read from the midi and have a good idea what is of interest just by scanning the notes visually.

The butterfly effect plays out all the time aswell, once you have good formulas that work together in art, you can, change very small parts within the formula and they produce drastic changes in the output . but you don't start from scratch. you can simply launch from a point of hypercomplexity that already works.

 

here is another zip with an hour of raw fractal mids from about 6 or 7 quasifractal compositions stuck together... really cool stuff. be awesome to get a similar kind thing inside of Reaktor.

 

OK heres another cool mega trick for using the sounds outputed by generators

so load up a Gen that gives an ever changing output and get the output recorded.... listen back.

whenever there is the type of one shot sound that might work well played as a riff (instead of just as a oneshot)

- clip the edges of the item and load it straight into a sampler which should be on a track above or below.
in Reaper its 'import item from arrange view'

- then set the mode so the note can be semitone shifted. if you have some guide drums set up you can preview it there and then... if you like it you can save it as a preset, then thats available to load again instantly in any project in the future.

so you could easy build up a bank of 20 or 40 totally original presets this way very quickly from the 20 minutes output of a Gen on the fly while your editing... multi tasking!

 

Cal thanks for letting us know where we can get almost infinite amounts of UMBAH. I'll definitely be checking it out!

The interplay between the machine and the human - between the system and the sensibility - that's where a lot of mystery happens. "The point of hypercomplexity that already works" - that's the mystery.

I know there are psychologists and other kinds of scientists who research e.g., the neuroanatomy of music appreciation or production. I think this would be a fertile research area: when someone is making the choices involved in building or tweaking a generative system, or editing and refining and combining the results, what is their brain doing? how are they making those choices?

Put another way, perhaps the question is: What makes something interesting?

For me, there's a certain point of complexity that, when reached, creates the illusion that the finite thing in front of you stretches outward infinitely in all directions. I don't know how to characterize the point of sufficient complexity when this occurs.

I've seen stage sets that seemed to go on for miles. I've seen graphic novels so long and rich you could almost fit a world inside of them. When I read a certain seven-volume fantasy series (the last two volumes of which have not yet appeared), or watch it on HBO, it seems to extend outward infinitely. And when I hear generative music that's complex enough so that I can't infer the underlying rule set, similarly, I feel like I'm confronted by something hauntingly large and complex, and possibly almost sentient. And that's very exciting.

 

Hi there,
Extremely new to this software and just kind of checking out the demo's right now BUT wanted to ask: where is Metaphysical Function? Is it a part of the Reaktor suite? I only have the demo so I don't know.

 

Yes, it's one of the 70 instruments and effects that come with Reaktor. When you add in all the free stuff in the user library, Reaktor is a tremendous value.

 

Friends, since we've talked a bit about algorithmic music composition here, I wanted to note an amazing now-free modular algorithmic MIDI composing environment called Artwonk http://algoart.com/ that you might want to look into. You could make it drive your Reaktor and Blocks ensembles.

It comes in two versions, Artwonk (which includes algorithmic visual art generation) and Musicwonk (which just does music). I get an error when installing the former, but not the latter. I've seen it favorably compared to Numerology.

I heard about Fractal Tune Smithy ($50, one month free trial) on this forum, and I think it's amazing.

Composers Desktop Project is also amazing, and completely free. You can make a donation to encourage ongoing development.

Just giving the space monkeys some new wrenches and hammers to play with. Enjoy.

 

Dear fellow adventurers

First of all, did you see Paul Ford's wonderful 2015 article, "what is code?" which took up an entire double issue of Bloomberg Magazine, and is available in its entirety for free here http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/ along with fun animated interactive sidebars?

It's about how (computer) code is basically everywhere, and everything. I recommend it.

Although the article contains no specific references to computer music, reading this article helped me get over my fear of learning to code. Before, whenever I saw a computer music application that involved anything that looked like the user had to write some code, I would start to tremble, then my skin would break out in hives, and then I'd have to do some deep breathing exercises to avoid having a panic attack.

That article made me interested in stepping into the vortex of coding, mainly so that I can generate streams of MIDI and then send them into Reaktor ensembles or other VSTs.

There are lots of possibilities out there. Here are three.

There's Euterpea, which is based on Haskell...

And there's SuperCollider, which is based on Smalltalk...

And perhaps best of all (from my perspective) there's OpenMusic, which is based on LISP and uses a visual GUI that's kind of like Reaktor. Except what travels through the wires is not signals... it's data, information, lists of MIDI pitches, rhythmic patterns, whatever.

All of these systems are enormously powerful. Like, it makes me dizzy to think how powerful they are.

And all of them... are available... online... for free.

Free.

I'm just starting to learn and explore this new world. Perhaps some of you have already been down some of these highways, and can report back. Or perhaps I can tempt some of you to come exploring out here too.

Fractal Tune Smithy is something I am still deeply fond of ($50, 30 day free trial) if you want to easily generate string quartets or 16 part microtonal symphonies based on any of the thousands of scales SCALA has ever heard of, and then send the MIDI into any Reaktor ensemble (or other VST). But just last week I started to have ideas FTS couldn't quite accommodate. (I'd like to have a 16 part fractal melody move through a series of modal transitions - but I don't want the transition to happen all at once, I want to smoothly and continuously interpolate from one harmonic cluster to the next, with each note's probability of occurring continuously and smoothly increasing or decreasing over time.)

I think I'm going to have to learn some code in order to do that.

So, if you've ever thought, "boy, this is great, this is awesome, but I wish I could..........."

you probably can

if you can code.