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Elysium gets some MIDI lovin

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:20:33 GMT

Since January I’ve been learning piano and, now that I am able to play a little, my attitude towards generative music has shifted. Whereas I used to use entirely generative parts in my music now I am trying to think about how I can incorporate generative music into the music I play myself: interactive generative music if you like.

As I was pondering this the idea hit me that each of the cells in an Elysium layer represents a note. What would happen if the generators on a layer pulsed not in response to the beat but in response to incoming MIDI notes? So that a generator on a C4 hex pulsed when I played C4 on my keyboard.

Well I couldn’t wait to find out so I added the feature (along with an impact trigger mode too) which is included in Elysium 0.9.7, released yesterday. Here’s a demo screencast I made to show how it works:

I hope you have some fun with this feature. I plan to do more screencasts to show off some of the hidden talents of Elysium!

I wasn't expecting this!!

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:17:00 GMT

So, one of my goals for this year was to see Elysium appear in Computer Music magazine which I’ve been reading for about 5 months and which I just got a subscription to. Ideally I’d like to see a full review but my goal was just to see it in print and I’d just started thinking about how I might make that happen.

You can imagine my surprise then as I leafed through the April edition, that landed on my doormat this morning, when on page 10 I saw a picture that I recognized. Great Maker! It’s Elysium!

It’s a short piece submitted by Peter Kirn & Create Digital Music and mentioned Mark’s reacTogon and the Axis controller as well. Sadly no mention of my name (ego check) and, more importantly, no link to Elysium but hopefully Google will provide.

I’d still love to see Elysium 1.0 get a proper review in CM before my subscription runs out next January but I was thrilled to see my work appear in print like this. Made my day!

Dial Control

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:44:22 GMT

I have made available on GitHub a new Cocoa custom view I’ve built for use in Elysium and other projects. It’s a fairly simple rotary dial control modeled on the dials in Ableton Live. It also has another, in progress, style that is more akin to the pan control in Logic Pro. I may do a couple more styles in due course.

You can see a video of the control:

The source is available on GitHub.

The control includes a demo app (shown in the video) and an Interface Builder 3 plugin. As such, hopefully, it’s a good resource for anyone else looking into building their own controls. It’s actually not that hard to do but navigating the copious documentation (esp. the IB plugin docs) can be a challenge.

I’m grateful to Ciaran Walsh, Tomas Franzén, Dave Verwer, and peropaal for help.

Elysium now with Javascript support

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:29:47 GMT

One of my early goals for Elysium was that it be an environment that is friendly to scripting. There is usually a balance point between hardcoding features and making them easy to use and creating “parts” that can be assembled into new, previously unimagined, wholes. With Elysium I have tried to follow the maxim: “Make the easy things easy and the hard things possible.”

My original plan had been to include Javascript based scripting support using Leopards Javascript core. But, without bridge support, this turned out to be a problem I had neither the time, nor the inclination, to solve. That’s when Laurent Sansonetti of Apple suggested I try MacRuby. As a long-time Ruby coder the idea of using Ruby was very attractive.

For several releases we have had scripting support using an embedded version of MacRuby. It was a bit of a bumpy ride getting it to work but Laurent put in quite some effort. However MacRuby is still a very young product and I think it’s quite a way from being ready for production use.

With the release of JSCocoa it’s possible to access JavascriptCore which is the Apple supplied Javascript interpreter that comes with Leopard and powers Webkit (and, hence, Safari). It’s pretty good and holds out the promise of being able to use the uber-fast SquirrelFish VM when that becomes available. With Elysium being very much a CPU bound application that’s quite an attractive proposition.

The latest release, version 0.9.2, swaps out MacRuby for JSCocoa. In the process the size of the application has shrunk considerably because I’m no longer bundling the MacRuby distribution. And we’ve also got back support for the PPC platform which has suspended because MacRuby is not supported on that architecture.

I’m a little sad not to be using MacRuby. All things considered I’d rather be writing Ruby than Javascript. And I’m grateful to Laurent for the work he did in trying to make MacRuby work for Elysium. But, overall, I think JSCocoa is a better choice for Elysium right now. I’ll take another look at supporting MacRuby when it gets closer to 1.0.

Expect the Elysium scripting guide soon.

Elysium is now open source

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:46:15 GMT

Today I released the source code to Elysium under the open source MIT license. I started working on Elysium at the end of July 2008. It's consumed a good few evenings and weekends since then and I feel it was time well spent as I've had a lot of fun with it. I hope now that the source is available other people will be encouraged to play with it and improve it. Happy New Year!

Elysium mentioned in Synthtopia

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:21:01 GMT

Elysium got a quick mention in Synthtopia recently. They quote from the Elysium site but, sadly, don’t link to it. Synthtopia’s a great site though. If you’re into computer music it’s definitely one to follow.

Elysium lives

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:49:46 GMT

It’s been a long time coming (at least, that’s how it feels to me) but my latest creation Elysium has finally arrived in open beta. It’s rough and ready but it’s out there and I look forward to hearing what other people do with it.

From a developers perspective Elysium has been my most challenging application yet. It’s forced me to learn how to implement a reasonably sophisticated Cocoa view, as well as mastering the document architecture, deal with NSThreads, and I’ve spent more time with bindings than I care to remember. Mostly it’s been quite fun and I think I will approach the next application with a good deal more confidence (when I decide what that is).

In the meantime I have a lot of plans for improving Elysium and I hope building some kind of community around it. In particular I have in mind some features for making it easy to share parts/whole compositions with others. More about that soon…

What the heck is generative music anyway?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:22:06 GMT

So, I don’t have a musical background. I love many forms of music but never learned to play any instruments as a child, don’t feel I have much sense of rhythm, and couldn’t tell you C# from F. Yet music is math and I know math, and much of the music I love has a palpable structure that you can appreciate. Over the years the gulf between these two things has bothered me.

A few months ago I came across (and I can’t remember where, so thank you if you’re the person who linked it for me) a video that changed everything. It was of something called reacTogon and it blew my mind:

The ability to both see and manipulate, in real-time, the structure of the music you are generating fascinated me. “This is something I would love to play with.”, I thought. Building my own reacTogon was far beyond me, but I reasoned that creating something like it in software should not be.

I had, coincidentally, recently bought Topher Cyll’s book ”Practical Ruby Projects” which has a chapter all about generating MIDI. I set about creating something that would let me play with the reacTogon concept in software.

With Topher’s LiveMIDI library in hand it wasn’t that hard to get something up and running. I learned about the harmonic table and built a data structure to represent it and the layers of elements that represent playheads being generated, played, and so forth.

I was kind of surprised that it worked, but it did.

However it was very hard to use. I was programming it using a YAML file and having to more or less guess where things might sound good. What it lacked was the visual feedback and tweakability of the reacTogon.

After spending some time trying to see how feasible it would be to graft a UI on top of my Ruby code I decided to bite the bullet and reimplement the musical engine in Objective-C and build the whole thing as a Cocoa application.

The result is Elysium which is being beta tested by a few brave souls right now. Here’s a screen shot or two and you can listen to this, rather ad hoc, composition too:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Best laid plans and all that...

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:25:11 GMT

A year or so ago I was harboring plans to work on an indy Mac application. It’s an application that I’ve had planned, on and off, for many years. I wrote the first version in C++ and MFC a lot of years ago, a version in Java+Swing, and so on. I think the Mac and Cocoa are the write place to write it, but the problem is time.

A year ago I had a lot of spare time. Today I have a challenging job and very little spare time. Certainly not the kind of time required to build a large and complex application. So I’ve shelved my plans for now and am concentrating on a smaller, hobby, project to keep my Cocoa skills from rusting altogether.

The first by-product of this is LMHoneycombView which is a Cocoa custom view that displays a hexagonal “honeycomb” surface. Hexes respond to selection and support custom drawing.

More on what I’m using this for in a little while…

And so it begins

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:52:52 GMT

Ever since I bought my first Macintosh computer (“Irulan” a 1.5 GHz 12” Powerbook G4 and still a lovely machine) in July of 2005 at the urging of my friend Beth I have wanted to be involved in MacOSX development. Something about the applications on the Mac just felt “right” and I really wanted to be a part of that.