A traditional music score can fill reams of paper. But make music generative, and a tiny amount of musical DNA can breed musical events. How little DNA is needed? How about 140 character worth – enough to fit into a single Twitter post? That’s what’s possible in Mixtikl 2, which dubs its Twitter musical “vectors” […]

Switching tools isn’t a panacea, but it can inspire new ideas, by changing the way you structure your music. Elysium is a powerful new sequencer in development for the Mac the creates generative patterns on a beehive-shaped hexagonal grid. For the hardcore, you can even extend the tool with Ruby and JavaScript. Elysium is a […]

Bloom is a new generative musical application for iPhone and iPod touch, created by Brian Eno and software designer Peter Shilvers. It’s quite simple, but if you’re looking for some soothing musical strains to float out of your mobile Apple device, this is your ticket. At launch, you’re given a choice of either using a […]

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 […]

Some good news, some bad news for iPhone/iPod Touch owners. (For everyone who doesn’t care, we’ll be consolidating iPhone news from here on out so you can safely ignore it.) Good news: iZotope’s mobile version of iDrum is here (seen above). It’s a nifty $5 toy, though some restrictions, including the lack of audio export, […]

Northwest Reef from Umcorps on Vimeo. Aside from being toy-like mini-computers, could mobile devices take on a musical usefulness all their own? At the Electronic Music Foundation’s 10th Anniversary Symposium in 2004, Morton Subotnik and fellow panelists imagined an iPod that, instead of playing canned music from your music library, would actually generate music for […]

Soundscape #1 from Umcorps on Vimeo. Tired of waiting for Spore, the upcoming Will Wright game that will feature organic, generative music by musical legend Brian Eno instead of … looping … the same 8 bars of audio … over and over again? Want to explore your own oblique strategies in music making and create […]