This Sound Byte gives you control over a reasonably complex UGen chain. The meat of it is a UGen I’ve called Granulizer, which takes sample data and, based on some parameters, randomly chooses short sections of the data to loop before jumping to a different short section. This sketch gives you mouse control over the size of the sections that are looped, as well as how many times they are looped. There are also keyboard commands for controlling some effects that the Granulizer is being patched through, such as a double delay, a resonant filter, a sample repeater, a bit crusher, and a playback rate controller. The controls are outlined on the applet page, so check it out!

I never really got into using max/msp or pd, but now that I’ve got these UGens to play around with in Minim, I’m finally discovering the joy of patching!

This very simple sketch is a little musical physics simulation. Click in it to spawn a ball that will bounce off the walls, producing notes each time it does. Listen with headphones for the best stereo effect. Try it!

The Melodizer is a variation on the Beat Generator. It will constantly generate a tune with a “melody” and a “bass line” by looking at the settings every measure and generating a measure with those settings. Each big slider represents a 16th note in a one bar loop. The value of each slider is the probability that the program will choose to generate a note on that 16th note when it generates a measure. The actual pitch it chooses for the note is determined by the current key and scale, as well as what the previously generated pitch was. If you look in the Scales.pde file you’ll see that for each pitch in a scale, I’ve encoded which steps in the scale are legal next notes. It’s a pretty crude melody building algorithm, but it does give the output a little bit more musicality. The drum beat is always the same, but there are three toggles that let you turn off the parts of the drum loop you don’t want to hear.

Some other things you can adjust are: tempo, shuffle (how much it “swings”), the waveforms used for the melody and bass lines, the volume of the melody and bass lines, and of course there is a button for randomizing the note probabilities.

Try it out!

What started out as simply curiosity about what it would sound like to run a Noise UGen through a TickRate UGen and slow it way down, turned into this interesting sound generating sketch. I’m using modulated Noise to drive a WaveShaper. The waveform being used in the WaveShaper is a sustained chord from a Rhodes, but you’ll never quite be able to hear that. Essentially what this Sound Byte lets you do is scrub through small sections of the recording in random ways (since there is noise involved). Experiment with lots of different slider settings, there is surprising amount of variety that can be obtained. Have a look at the code to see exactly what you are controlling. Try out the settings in the screenshot above for a reasonably mellow sweeping formant sound with a really mesmerizing waveform.

Play with it!