Les Ondes Memorielles is an electronic instrument, which has a memory, and some controls to play it back. It is an ongoing project since the nineties of the last millenium. Though back then I called it simply “delay sequencer”.
The first incarnation would utilize a boss SE-70 with its 12 pitch shifter/delays. This effect was controlled by Midi (no MSP back then). I needed a huge rack with samplers and other delays and a huge mixer.
In the mean time, all of this went into MaxMSP and a light weight laptop, with a bunch of Midi controllers…
The basic idea is to extend the usual looper setup by using multiple delays, each being able to feedback and to change the pitch. Thus I can create a delay sequence. I play a single note, and dependent on the delay times and their pitches, I get back a melody. By feeding back some of the delays, I can build dense textures of sound. The whole thing has also a recording area to record incoming sounds and choose arbitrarily up to 16 loops within that material…
The instrument isn’t public yet, but might become so in the future…

Its completely patched in Max/MSP

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