Have you ever wanted to enslave your own Aphex Twin, then have him make endless rhythms for you, but worried about care and feeding of a Richard D. James?
Do you want to soak up the glory of the life of an IDM musician (the touring in helicopters, the seven-figure royalties), but want to avoid the actual work of making the music?
Well, then this Csound-based tool is for you. Run it, and it spits out a nice random rhythm or two. Leave it running, and it’ll generate a whole folder full of rhythms and various bpm. Dump those into Ableton Live, pick out the ones you like, and … ah, okay, now you will have to do some work turning this into music. (Effects …. maybe. Arrangement … well, or just loop one endlessly and pop off for lunch. Or make them into something new, original, and very much your own. Kind of up to you, really, though soon we should have some machine learning that decides for you what you probably would like to choose.)
It’s all the fault – erm, work – of one Micah Frank, who actually makes his living as a sound designer. (Meaning, of course – Micah what are you doing?!) Switch it on, and wait for hundreds of sounds to come your way.
Right now, it’s pretty simple – and it takes all night because it’s real-time, not offline. (On the other hand, you could output sound and have lovely, very weird and erratic, sonic wallpaper.) But Micah plans lots of additional features here, plus a whole compositional environment.
So there you have it. Skip the all nighter. Catch up on sleep.
You saw it here first.
https://github.com/chronopolis5k/Beatfox
Nice to see this sketch from when this was conceived.