MIDI Tinkering - A Garden

[tinctoris]

I'm hard at work on setting up an "improvisation system" for the piano right now, that will let me add a bit more complexity beyond what I can do with two hands. It's fairly easy to set up something that acts as an accompaniment, like a karaoke backing track, but that doesn't give me the freedom I want. I want more of a place I wander around in,

Comments

[bryguypgh]

and at least one foot on the sustain pedal.

Sometimes two for extra sustain? :) No seriously , this sounds incredibly neat.

[tinctoris]

I've got 3 pedals, the other two I don't use so much so I could spare a foot.

I just created a really patch that serves as a rough proof of concept, which you can hear here. The blipping in the background is generated from the bass notes in the piano. Now to make it smarter!

[mzrowan]

This sounds like something the Echo Nest APIs could help with (where fennel works), except that I don't think you can do analysis on the fly yet, only of completed tracks. But just in case: Echo Nest Remix.

[fennel]

Yeah, sadly, the whole API infrastructure creates too much latency to use it for 'simultaneous' analysis of music as it's being played-- the analyzer itself is fast (something like 20x realtime) but you'd have a delay of several measures at best.

Some people who wanted to use us as a performance tool did this:

http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/w/page/21942244/EchnoNestLive

but I have literally no idea what it does, not being familiar with Ableton or MaxMSP or anything.

[tinctoris]

Oh, very neat indeed! This seems like a clever way (based on the description) to use what just happened musically to be the seed for what's about to happen. I could see this being very useful as a slowly evolving installation piece.

What would be fairly useful and entirely workable without realtime analysis would being able to pre-slice video data and then have it available to respond to the audio as it's being generated...

[fennel]

Oh, yeah. Actually, I think one of the examples packaged with ENRemix would get you most of the way to that video triggering you talk about-- it slices a video up and then delivers the samples according to their sonic similarity with the segments of an unrelated audio file. It should be in Video A From B or if not there, somewhere in that folder.