Ready to step beyond normal step sequencers? Skip ahead in the tutorial videos here, and you’ll see what’s possible: elaborate grid patterns that don’t just play looped patterns ad infinitum. Now, as in milkshakes and ice cream cones, sometimes vanilla is just fine. For instance, this week, Nord released Nord Beat, a free step sequencer […]

What’s a “lab,” anyway? For music, any number of tools – software or hardware – can become gateways to creative musical explorations. Chris Stack joins us again to look at Nodal, Mac/Windows software that generates musical patterns from graphical maps of nodes, alongside hardware explorations. Along the way, Chris has some reflections on composition itself. […]

What makes music software popular? Simple recording, DJ, and remix apps unsurprisingly do well. But perhaps as a testament to the importance of individual music expression, some stranger entries do, too. And those less-typical software creations can give you new ways of exploring music creation and performance. Just take Nodal. GarageBand sits comfortably at the […]

Brian Eno should be proud. Generative sequencing – making lovely, shimmering music mapped to pleasant-sounding modes – is totally in this season. At top, exhibit A: Aura Flux, a new iOS ambient music generator. Priced at US$1.99, it nonetheless packs some 48 different instruments, ambient sounds, four keys, save/load capability, and multitasking support. Sequences are […]

Microsoft Research have added live, collaborative visuals to their bag of tricks for the Microsoft Surface multitouch table. Of course, in the process, they’re really demonstrating not only what you might to with Surface but with multitouch interfaces in general. In fact, it’s particularly odd that Microsoft hasn’t apparently made the connection with more generally-available […]

Sequencers by definition traditionally lock musical patterns into repetitive, unchanging blocks of time. But a new generation of generative sequencers can instead form organic patterns that change and transform. Nodal is a totally free-as-in-beer (closed-source) sequencer for composing music. (A license is needed for commercial use.) As the name implies, it uses a matrix of […]

Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are […]

If you’re interested in generative and algorithmic music – music that evolves organically rather than being pre-composed in start-to-finish linear fashion – you won’t want to miss this site. Nodal is a free (for non-commercial use) app for developing generative musical systems and transmitting MIDI. You’ll need a Mac (PowerPC/Intel) to run the software, but […]

It’s still early in development (read: it often crashes), but The Bean Machine applies nodal, patch-based development to Java. The interface is mysteriously close to Quartz Composer, down to capabilities, UI, and even the 3D cube tutorial. Personally, I use Java because it can do things Quartz Composer can’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless — and […]

In an epic year for Epic, November does it again. Unreal Fest 2022 brought a bunch of sessions on the latest from Unreal Engine, from sound to visuals. And it’s worth making sure that doesn’t fly under the radar of creative musicians, composers, and visualists, especially because there are some updates in their unique audio engine, too.