Upon our return from our anniversary getaway, we discovered a small package in our mail pile, bearing a return address in Japan. Within, a CD: Hermetech Records' initial release, a compilation called Word Become Flesh. Inside, a brief note telling me that the last track makes heavy use of my tone generator plugin, Edge. The track's very pretty, and the whole disc is pretty cool, lots of weird "electroacoustic mind mash". I've only given the disc one distracted listen so far. Some Download-esque stuff in there (which covers a lot of range, actually).
It's kind of exciting. I've been doing all these projects as egoware: use them for free, but tell me if you think they're cool, tell me what you do with them. Getting a disc which includes music that uses my code, even if it's only part of one track, is exactly what I want from these projects. I've gotten some kind words from users, but this is a new milestone, definitely.
Edge isn't even that cool. It only makes sense in the Audiomulch-Edge-Matrix-Pegger context, and it falls over badly performance-wise when you mess with its harmonic content while it's active. Might be time to build a more robust version...
MIDITab is far enough along that I can recommend it to one and all. It's here.
To recap, this app takes a Wacom or compatible graphics tablet and turns it into a MIDI controller. The tablet, depending on model and accessories, can detect X and Y position of the tip of a stylus, the pressure of the tip on the tablet surface, and the azimuth and elevation angles of the body of the stylus relative to the tablet. That's five axes right there, and through a variety of means, my app lets you switch among several sets of control mappings so you can drive 5 MIDI parameters at a time out of 20 or more total. Theoretically it can handle 8 axes times 12 control sets for a total of 96 controllers, but I don't think any real-world hardware exists that will really do that.
It's tricky to use more than about three of the total axes at a time, in terms of figuring out what the right parameters are to map them onto, in remembering the mappings, and then in being aware of, say, the tilt of the pen while you're paying attention to the tip pressure. It may take a little practice before it really comes into its own. Still, I think it can be an interesting performance and composition tool.
Man, it's dusty in here... haven't written an entry for ages.
My current song is coming along slowly. I like the basic thing I've got so far, but every time I try and add some texture over the top of it, I don't like it and I wind up tearing it all back out. I know it needs something more interesting but nothing I try works out right.
A couple more plugin projects got suggested to me, one of which I can't believe I never thought of before. Wacom graphics tablet. MIDI. You move the pen on the tablet, it sends controller data to a MIDI target. So simple. This is meriko's first week off in ages, though, so that project waits. I'll sneak in a little work here and there while she's distracted with her own projects...
The other plugin is really pretty basic — a tempo-synchronous delay line with a longer limit on delay time than the Mulch-builtin one — like up to a minute or more. It'll be memory-hungry, like 10MB per channel-minute. Probably one of the knobs should be "max memory to use" so that if you accidentally swat the tempo or the delay time controls, it doesn't suddenly start swapping to disk. Of course, this is something Ross should do as a builtin. Of course, Ross has a huge list of enhancements on his plate, and I believe Mulch is not a full-time endeavor for him. With few exceptions, writing this kind of audio software is not in and of itself a way to make a living.