Generative/Random patch help.
Heya. I’ve been trying lately to improve on a random music patch that I made a while ago, but it’s not really coming out the way I want it to. Overall it doesn’t seem to have any sort of coherance – I’m trying to go for something like http://www.jonasbjerre.com/pianofm.html, which seems to be much more generative and musical.
Does anyone have any good methods of making such generative systems?
Christopher Dobrian’s algocomp blog is a good place to start:
http://algocomp.blogspot.co.uk/
Cheers
Roger
Also, the actual standard max tutorials work really well towards building quite a bit of the good generative stuff.
The example you link to seems to have a limited number of notes for both fm and piano sounds – so I am thinking you simply need to select pitches that the patch selects from, rather than (I’m assuming) trying to generate them randomly?
algocomp looks to be exactly what I was looking for, thank you! I’m gonna grind my way through it.
And yeah, for the purposes of my patch, I just wanna select between 8 random pitches within a scale. I’m thinking of also using jit.cellblock to create/edit a table of random values that my patches select from (but I’ll worry about that later.) But I’m absolutely for learning about completely generative methods as well, of course.
If you have such a limited number of notes to choose from, Coll can be a good choice.
In addition to the Algorithmic Composition blog cited by Roger, some of these examples might help you.
Example 9: Table lookup
Example 11: Sequential or random access of a lookup table
Example 13: Look up chords in an array
Example 14: Automated blues "improviser"
Example 18: Automated minimal composer
Listen to examples 13 and 14 simultaneously to hear an emulation of a hopelessly bad department store pianist. :)