You can get it for Android and iPhone:

• PO Sync for Android
• PO Sync for iPhone

This was a fun app to build. I made it because somebody left this review on one of my other apps on Google Play:

Using this for the PO sync feature. I like that most; everything else is okay... I think a great idea would be to make an app with just the PO sync feature and a tempo slider or wheel, plus an on/off

So I knew there was at least one person who wanted this app. It was simple to implement and I got to use my favourite programming languge, ClojureScript. I love it when people need software that I know I can put together quickly. You can get the source code here:

https://github.com/chr15m/PocketSync

2023 is going to be the year of pocket operator apps for Dopeloop and I. I hope to make at least 4 new music apps. I'll post back here when I release them (and also to newsletter + Dopeloop subscribers).

After many days of debugging (and filling out a bajillion forms) Melody Generator is finally available as an iOS app!

It's also available on the Google Play store.

You can still use the web app without installing anything at dopeloop.ai/melody-generator.

Enjoy!

The fractalesque algorithm it uses to generate melodies is one I came up with when I was writing a lot of algorave music a decade ago. The MIDI melodies are rendered to sound using the wasm port of Timidity by Feross.

Enjoy!

Yesterday I released Hacksilver, an album of procedurally generated "algorave" music. Some people had questions about the technology used to write it so I thought I'd write this up.

The beats and melodies were generated using drillbit, a LISP codebase written in a Python variant called Hy. The project outputs Impulse Tracker mod files which are then played and mixed live.

The interesting parts of that codebase are in the generators folder. For example the drill-n-bass choppage generator is here.

Each generator has three functions:

• make-sample-set: which generates IT wav tables that are used by the generator (e.g. individual drum kit or synth sounds)
• make-pattern-settings: which sets up parameters & context that will be re-used by the pattern generator to provide similarity across pattern variations
• make-pattern: which outputs the pattern data in a format easily consumed by the Impulse Tracker file writer

Mixing and live-effects are performed in Pure Data. Originally I was using a fully software based mixer. However I discovered that a nicer mode of operation is to have individual bits of sound generating/filter hardware chained together. So I started using this Raspberry Pi based mixer + FX unit from another project to mix live.

One other bit of software in there is jsfxr which is wrapped by the LISP code and outputs 8-bit synth sounds (which are then used by the pattern generator). Because the synth definitions are simple JSON hash maps there is a fun pseudo-evolutionary technique I was able to use where you interpolate between the values of two synth definitions to generate new sounds based on two synth definitions that you like.

I also built a little hardware Impulse Tracker renderer based on a Raspberry Pi running XMP with my friend Dimity. It has a Pocket Operator style sync output and runs directly into the mixer that both share the same timing and the fx can be quantised to the music which is playing.

If you're interested in the music hardware that Dimity and I are building and selling you can stay updated at bzzt.studio.

In the image at the top of this post the hardware Impulse Tracker renderer is the little box on the right hand side. The RPi mixer/fx unit is to the top right of the C64 keyboard. The Korg Nanokontrol2 strapped to the C64 keyboard is controlling the fx and mixing parameters on the RPi. They keyboard itself was for playing live synth sounds (a very simple arpeggiating subtractive synthesizer built in Pd).

I just released Hacksilver, a new album of procedurally generated music.

It uses a whole slew of weird tech to generate the beats, melodies, synth sounds including beat-generating LISP, 8-bit synth generating Javascript, and Pure Data for the mixing and mastering. One thing that was particularly fun was procedurally generating Impulse Tracker files.

Would appreciate a re-share if you know of anybody who might be into this type of thing.

Enjoy!

Speccy is a small utililty I built for live-coding chiptune music in the browser with Clojurescript.

You can copy sounds from sfxr.me and paste them in as synth definitions, using code to modify any parameter over time, or start from scratch by building a synth up from basic parameters.

You can paste the following examples into the online editor to try it out:

; blippy synth
(sfxr {:wave :square :env/decay 0.1 :note #(at % 32 {0 24 3 29 7 60 12 52 19 29 28 52})})

; donk bass
(sfxr "1111128F2i1nMgXwxZ1HMniZX45ZzoZaM9WBtcQMiZDBbD7rvq6mBCATySSmW7xJabfyy9xfh2aeeB1JPr4b7vKfXcZDbWJ7aMPbg45gBKUxMijaTNnvb2pw"
      {:note #(or
        (at % 57
          {5 35
           27 34})
        (at % 32
           {0 24
            6 29
            18 21
            26 12}))})

; hi hat
(sfxr {:wave :noise
       :env/sustain 0.05
       :env/decay 0.05
       :vol #(sq % [0.3 0.1 0.2 0.1])})

; snare
(sfxr "7BMHBGCKUHWi1mbucW62sVAYvTeotkd4qSZKy91kof8rASWsAx1ioV4EjrXb9AHhuKEprWr2D4u4YHJpYEzWrJd8iitvr23br2DCGu7zMqFmPyoSFtUEqiM64"
      {:note 36
       :vol #(at % 16
         {4 0.5
          12 0.5})})

The full source code and documentation is available at GitHub.

Enjoy!

After 14 years of playing music together on Gameboy Advance and Commodore 64 my buddy Fenris and I finally recorded an album while he was visiting during Xmas.

You can listen to the album for free or purchase a download for however much you like.

All of the software we use to play music is Free and Open Source:

• Looper Advance
• aSid
• Raspberry Pi FX unit
• c64 paddle MIDI controller

I hope you enjoy the music.

In November I was in New York for PdCon 2016 and to visit my brother, thanks in large part to my friend Joe Deken and his not-for-profit, New Blankets.

The conference was fantastic. Many fascinating performances, a chance to catch up in person with people from the Pure Data community, and the opportunity to present and perform some of my own work. A highlight for me was hearing Miller Puckette, creator of Pure Data, talk about his approach and philosophy.

On top of that I got to catch up with some awesome people outside of the conference, especially my brother. We went hiking together one day - a rare opportunity to hang out together in nature.

Tonight my friend Fenris and I will play some music in a park here in Perth, Western Australia, on Gameboy and Commodore 64 powered by batteries and broadcast over FM radio to local speakers hanging from the trees. We'll start playing at 9:30pm and after us our friends Atomsmasha and Kataplexia will also play some music on Gameboys.

Might see you there!

I am playing algorithmic rave music at Rhetoric in Western Australia.

• February 5th, 2016
• Game city { Raine Square / Perth Train Station }
• Doors open 6pm
• $10 Entry
• Free arcade games
• With: chr15m, cbat, marko maric, atomsmasha, kataplexia, amnesia, polite society & free arcade games.

My buddy Fenris and I are playing at Square Sounds Festival in Melbourne next week, Saturday the 21st of March, 2015 at The Evelyn Hotel.

I hacked together quite a bit of new software for this gig and I am tremendously excited about it. I think we are even going to practice our songs first this time. See you there!

I'm very lucky to be a small cog in a larger movement of new music called Algorave. This is dance music made by software algorithms, or to put it more poetically "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals," in the words of Alex McLean who coined the term.

I'll be playing some music from this genre live at the following places and times in the days and weeks ahead:

• 2014/05/31 - This Saturday at Maker Faire Torino here in Italy.

• 2014/06/27 - at the xCoAx conference official Algorave in Porto, Portugal.

• 2014/07/04 - at an Algorave in The Loft in Brighton.

I am very excited!

The software I am using was developed inside Miller S. Puckette's Pure Data.

how to play deviator movie from pvi collective on Vimeo.

deviator is an immersive, real-world, outdoor game which invites players to temporarily transform their city into a playground. your mission is to seek out 15 audio instructions hidden in public spaces and play as many of the games as possible. as a deviator you can explore the local area, play a series of on-site games, interact with on-site performers, receive points and send text messages within this application.

using gps and the camera on your phone, deviator allows you to select a game from an on-screen map, locate it and scan a strategically placed qr code to activate the game instructions. games are scored in terms of difficulty and range from activities such as "guerrilla pole dancing" and "ring-a-ring-a-roses", to "spin the bottle" and "twister". each game encourages the player to explore their public space in a new way.

There were just so many great things about working on this project.

• As an artwork I think it's pretty compelling.
• The technology was a lot of fun:
  • Fully "vertically integrated" software stack - got to code up both the clients and server.
  • Cross-platform smartphone clients for Android OS and iOS using PhoneGap (HTML5, Ajax, etc.).
  • Python + Django back-end and API.
  • Multiplayer game-like server features, messaging, point scoring, real-time map with player locations.
  • QR codes!
• PVI Collective are just really nice people and easy to work with (happily this seems to be a trend with my clients at the moment).
• Got to ride my bike to work which is always invigorating.

The first tour of the work is showing in a few weeks - the last week of July 2012 - at Surge Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be there as "tech guy", so if you are a fellow geek into Free Software, video games programming, Pure Data, makerbots, etc. and want to share a beer look me up!

There will be other tours coming up around the world, and if you are interested in booking the tour at a festival in your city, please contact projects@pvicollective.com for more info.

Bye!

• buy it on iTunes
• buy it at Amazon
• spotify

It's called squeakyshoecore EP and you can find it in most mp3 shops now. I would really appreciate it if you would give it a review, or tweet/facebook it, do a blog post, give it a listen, or buy it.

Visit the squeakyshoecore page to like/share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus

Any help you can give me getting the word out would be very appreciated.

Thank you so much!

It comes with a reasonable web interface you can access over your LAN, but I installed the fun_plug hack on it by copying the files across the network and restarting the device - easy. That hack gets you SSH access, rsync, and a bunch of other Linuxy stuff.

We are storing our media and backups on it and it is basically perfect for that use-case. I now once again have a cron-and-rsync based regular backup of all of my servers in the USA, hooray! I'm also routing all SSH traffic to our ADSL router through to it so I can access the files on the device from outside our network if neccessary.

All in all I am very pleased with this purchase.

My new hosting provider is much more reliable than my old one. Hooray!

My new one is called prgmr.com and they are great.

I have also taken the opportunity to redesign my website. I hope you like it.

Today I submitted this PocketLoops prototype app to the Univation WApp competition.

This builds on my PdDroidParty work, which is the engine of the app (as well as the impending CanOfBeats re-release!).

Fun mobile-music times. :)

• http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/android-is-a-ghetto
• http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/android-iphone-evolution-intelligent-design
• http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/developing-for-apple-vs-developing-for-android
• http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/goog-is-the-new-msft

I'll be playing some squeakyshoecore algorithmic acid this Thursday afternoon at Hermann's Bar at the University of Sydney. I'm on at 5pm. See you there!

If you are going to that thing at Kurb gallery it's just down the road, so drop by for a bit. :)

Hope to see you!

Also, my musical partner in crime, Fenris aka Maddest Kings Alive found this video of us playing as Chrism & Fenris some years ago. Enjoy!

• Supply USB gamepad drivers for Android OS (this code is actually already in the GNU/Linux kernel underneath Android OS).
• Put joystick hooks into the Android Java API and market this fact to developers.
• Encourage TV retailers to sell branded USB gamepads as add-ons with their Android based set-top boxes and TVs.

Developers could then put joystick support in their games, and people could play said games on their TVs through their Android OS set-top boxes. USB Gamepads are a stable, cheap, and robust technology which everyone understands.

This may result in a new indie console gaming golden age, with all of the wonderful new indie games of recent years running in peoples' lounge rooms on their TVs just like in the 80s. Admit it, wouldn't you love to sit cross legged together under the TV and return to the days of Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario Bros., Alex Kidd, Commander Keen, and friends? Only newer, and cheaper, and open, and network multiplayer. Oh boy, that is a vision I find irresistable!

A guy can dream, right?

• Take photos with phone.
• Email photos from phone to an address on my server, which forwards:
• To a gmail address, where it goes to Google Buzz.
• To a special Wordpress email address which posts the pictures to the blog.
• The Wordpress thing also posts the pictures on Twitter and Facebook.

What I love about this was I didn't have to write any code to make it happen, but it still uses open source components and my own server. It's also ridiculously convenient which is very important when you have a newborn. I don't have to rely on some horrible corporation (they are just some of the end-points where the stuff arrives). I am a pretty huge fan of things which involve writing less code.

If you like images, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. I promise it won't all be photos of my wonderful daughter. :)

Now I am going to post some drawings I scribbled.

PS Here is another cool internet thing someone did for selling stuff on the internet without writing any code. It came from Warren Ellis' blog.

PPS another thing is what I am reading and sharing on Google Reader, which is here.

This is an mp3 of the radio interview I did with Peter Barr for local radio station RTRFM

This is a magazine interview I did for Drum Media Perth; sorry it is a graphic. here is the Flash applet source of this excerpt.

Enjoy!

More links:

• Listen to squeakyshoecore here

• GarageAcidLab is the set of patches I use to play the music from squeakyshoecore. There is an Android app too which you can purchase at that link.

• You can find some other squeakyshoecore articles and interviews I did previously here.

On the 18th of December, I will also be playing a live gig in Hyde Park, Perth. I will be using the GarageAcidLab algorithms that I use to make squeakyshoecore here in Perth, Western Australia as part of the Seriously Sound System music festival organised by the local radio station, RTRFM. I am on just after midday at 12.40 in the afternoon. It should be a lot of fun!

Leading up to that I will be interviewed on that radio station at 8am local time this Friday the 10th of December. If you are not awake for it (like me), or you don't live in Western Australia, you can listen to the podcast, which I'll post here afterwards if I can figure out where it is.

Kampai!

Here are some articles that nice people have written about squeakyshoecore:

• Create Digital Music
• Vague Terrain
• Shallow Rave

To use GarageAcidLab (the engine used to make squeakyshoecore) on your Android phone or on your PC with Pure Data, click here:

Here is a small website I made about the software, which you can also download and run inside Pure Data. It's Free Software, like most of my other work.

This is also the set of patches that I am using to create the album squeakyshoecore.

There's a good reason I haven't been posting many squeakyshoecore tunes lately, or making much progress on my video game Infinite8BitPlatformer. I've been hacking hard in my spare time, and the good news is that CanOfBeats, my algorithmic hiphop beat generator, is now available for Android phones and devices! So if you are seeking beats and you rock an Android phone, help an indie developer out and get yrself a copy from the Android Market.

Enjoy!

Hope you enjoyed these drawings of my ultimate music-making dream setup. My apologies to anyone using a screen reader.

I finished this new tune a few days ago but I'm only just getting around to releasing it. Go to the squeakyshoecore page and click song five to hear it.

Here are the Pure Data patches used to create this music.

I have uploaded a new squeakyshoecore tune called Hilbert Curve, named after my favorite fractal. Czech it here.

Also, here are the Pure Data patches which are used to make this music. You can control them with a midi controller.

Below is a video of the talk I gave at PyCon AU at the end of June. In it I talk about my time working for London based "reactive music" company, RjDj, and also about my video game Infinite8BitPlatformer.

I haven't posted an Infinite8BitPlatformer update for ages, and I have been meaning to do so since a lot of progress has been made since my last post, but here's a quick update:

• Multiplayer code: this is going really well. It's almost at the point of beta release.
• Contributors: another person has started contributing to the codebase. I am hopefully going to be merging his code this weekend. Julian has put basic chat into the multiplayer code, among other tweaks and bugfixes, and a huge amount of very useful information for other people looking to contribute. He's been very patient about my lack of time!

Anyway, back to work.

The software makes two different beats and two complementary melodies using random number generators and some carefully tuned algorithms for using those random numbers. The melody shaping rules involve applying a low dimensional random fractal effect on very basic seed melodies, producing a type of self-similarity which seems to sound interesting to humans. The beats are created using a variety of custom rule sets, much like my previous work with algorithmic hip-hop in CanOfBeats and my algorithmic drum-and-bass generator, GhostWave.

After that I manually control how loud each of the parts are present in the mix, what effects are being applied to the different parts, and the parameter values of those effects. I use a midi controller to mix it in real time and record it.

Soon I will make the latest version of the Pure Data patches ("GarageAcidLab") available online under a Free Software license.

Enjoy the first tracks!

P.S. Some other music I've released on the net previously is Cryptolect, end-of-millenium style chopped-up breakbeats.

Thursday 22nd of October, 2009 @ 7:30pm

The Roebuck Pub (SE1 4YG)

• Rob Munro
• Jonny Stutters
• Ryan Jordan
• Chris McCormick
• Cane Toad Orchestra

I'm probably going to play a set with my Garage Acid Lab Pd patches, if I can get it together in time.

cc65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines, including

• The Commodore VIC20, C16/C116, C64, C128, C116, Plus/4, 510 (aka P500), the 600/700 family and newer PET machines (not 2001).

• The Apple ][ and successors.

• The Atari 8 bit machines.

• GEOS for the C64 and C128.

• The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

• The Supervision console.

• The Oric Atmos.

• The Lynx Console.

This is the compiler that I used to create aSid, a program which turns your commodore64 into a synthesizer.

The zipfile under the image above contains a Pure Data patch which procedurally generates a virtually infinite number of acid and breakbeat loops. I've found that it's quite a lot of fun to play with!

Start by loading the patch called 0_START.pd and then turn up the volume and the cutoff. After that hit the big red button a few times until you hear something you like.

I was making it into an RjDj scene, but I am not really sure if I'll ever get around to finishing it.

Enjoy!

It would be nice if a few more people hear it, so if you like it I would really appreciate it if you blog/tweet or whatever about it.

This album was composed with a type of old school software called a tracker early this decade, which was and still is often used to make video game music.

Thanks for listening.

The second one is an Ill FM gig which will be broadcast on the radio. I'll be doing my normal Pd-with-the-laptop-lid-closed-and-a-midi-controller set.

Wednesday night

++ PUBCODE2 ++

Part two in the first series of livecoded music events in London.

http://toplap.org/uk/

Live coding is a new direction in electronic music and video, and is starting to get somewhere interesting. Live coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals. All code manipulation is projected for your pleasure.

When: 7pm - 11pm, Wednesday 5th August 2009

http://toplap.org/uk/event/pubcode2/

Featuring: chr15m (making machines that make machines make music) MCLD (beatboxing + livecoding, is it possible?) Yee-King + Click Nilson (algorithmic choreography) openSlub (crowdsourced livecoding)

Place: The Roebuck 50 Great Dover Street London SE1 4YG

Map

Door tax: Free

Tube: Borough (5 mins walk) London Bridge (9 mins walk)

More info: http://toplap.org/uk/

Thursday night

Anyway, it's really nice stuff. I am blown away by how much great music there is out there now released for free under Creative Commons licenses.

OpenLab 5 : Cafe OTO, 25th April 2009

Openlab are providing a day of workshops & presentations about opensource software, and performances in the evening at Cafe OTO, Dalston. There is a venerable lineup of OpenLab members providing some in depth knowledge during the day and some great performances at night. The preliminary line up goes like this:

DAY: Workshops & Presentations : 12 - 5pm (free entry).

NIGHT: Performances : 7:30pm - 12:30am (5 pounds entry) - doors 7pm

Presentations

• Arduino + PD (Ryan Jordan) : Using Arduino and PureData

• SC + Processing (Daniel Jones) : Using Supercollider with Processing

• Pd/Gem + ergates (Chris McCormick) : PureData audiovisual software

• Groworld (Dave Griffiths) : Permaculture meets online games via guerilla gardening http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Groworld

• Processing/Java/Eclipse/JOGL/GLSL(Rob Munro) : Techniquies for using Processsing with the Eclipse IDE. http://robmunro.net/video

• Din (S Jagannathan) http://code.google.com/p/din, Boxar http://www.poojyum.com/boxar : A free software musical instrument for performing indian classical music live (but not just)

Workshops

• Fluxus (Dave Griffiths) : (free, 1-2hrs, max 10) The venerable OpenGL/scheme environment. http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Fluxus

• APODIO (Julien Ottavi) : (1hrs, max 20) Gnu/Linux multimedia distribution LiveDVD

• Introducing Processing for Visual Artists (Evan Raskob) : (10 pounds, 2hrs, max 20)

Performances

• dskg - Uses circuit bended machines altogether with open sources http://www.myspace.com/dskg

• Jeremah - pixelated landscapes of techno beats, music box melodies and processed street noise http://www.jeremah.co.uk/

• Rob Munro - audiovisual work exploring the world between http://robmunro.net/video

• TheNoiser - The Noiser use noise as musicality, combined to an approach of programmatic composition http://www.noiser.org

• PixelPusher - video and sound pieces; interactive art including new musical instruments http://pixelist.info/

• Ryan Jordan - Body-sensor-noise-strobe-hypnosis http://ryanjordan.org/

• Daniel Jones - generative audio-visual works http://www.erase.net

• S Jagannathan - a free software musical instrument for performing indian classical music live (but not just) http://code.google.com/p/din

• Robert Atwood - experiments with the sound created by feedback http://variseq.nongnu.org/

• Chris McCormick - uses Free Software to make bleepy crunchy music http://mccormick.cx

You are all very welcome - see you there.

MORE INFO : openlab

Hopefully I'll get a chance to update Looper Advance soon and then I can release it properly as 100% Free Software.

MaxMod appears to be pretty comprehensive in that its API provides for mod-playing, sample-playing, and direct access to streaming buffers. This basically means you can write apps which mix and match all three types of audio playback.

maxmod

Also good and recently blogged on Offworld is Leaves by Mattison. It's a wicked irie dub of chiptune source material by the artist.

Who needs the record labels? Not me.

The social and server side features I've been working on for the last 5 months for Reality Jockey Ltd. along with the rest of the team, are finally online, co-incident with an update of the main app and the albums being made free for a limited time. This is in huge part due to Andie, who really kept us all focussed and moving constantly towards this target. Live site, at last! Feels great.

This is pretty exciting for me as it's the first time a project that I've been a part of has made it onto the Boing Boing network. Offworld post, yay!

In addition to that, RjDj chose to feature a couple of my scenes, which I worked on in my spare time outside company hours: CanOfBeats, and GhostWave, which has propelled them to into the 'most popular' position on the website. They never would have been finished in time if it was't for Frank and Florian's hard work at the last minute, fixing all my horrible bugs and adding nifty features.

My excitement is only tempered by the fact that I wrote a large amount of the server side code, so if it collapses in a heap under the weight of the ogling internet it's probably my fault. It seems to be holding up alright so far though, with most of the heavy content in Amazon's S3 cloud, and liberal use of FastCGI and LightHTTPd. The backend is mostly written in Django + Python if you'd like to know. Python is a king amongst programming languages and it means that I go to work each day looking forward to writing code instead of dreading null pointers, buffer overflows, lack of type flexibility, arcane syntax, and all of the other horrid issues which plague other popular programming languages.

The other huge piece of amazing tech that I should mention and which makes up probably the bulk of the client side code is the free and Open Source (BSD license) Pure Data DSP patching language by Miller S. Puckette. Whilst not a wonderful general purpose programming language, it does one thing and does it superbly. All of the RjDj scenes are actually just Pd patches with a fancy image or two and some custom externals running.

Good times!

Last night I put the finishing touches on an RjDj scene that I've been working on in my spare time called GhostWave. It's a dark algorithmic drum & bass generator which lets you hum the bass lines. If you have the latest version of the RjDj single (free!) installed on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can simply visit this page from safari on the phone and click the following link with your finger:

GhostWave.rjz

By itself it does very little but make randomly raw semi-melodic noise. Shake it quite hard a few times to start some hi-hats tickering, and then hum a bass line into the mic. To record and loop your hummed bassline, put your finger on the little ghost as you hum your melody in time to the hats. Let go when you're done and the melody should loop. Once you're done, shake it vigorously a few more times to bring in the beat. After listening for a while the beats will fade, but you can bring them back by shaking some more, and you can continue to press the little ghost to record more melody loops.

Let me know what you think.

Have fun!

It can be summed up as a cross between the fish-and-leaves toy in Electroplankton, Crayon Physics, and The Incredible Machine. The idea is that users of the game can make "composition sculptures" by dragging various elements, each of which make a unique type of sound, onto the canvas. The sounds that each element make are triggered by tiny pinballs which are shot from cannons and bounce off the elements. Complex sculpture compositions can be set up where the balls bounce from element to element creating chains of different sounds, even music.

User Interface

The user interface is pretty self explanatory. Mousing over the strip down the left hand side causes the panel to slide out, and then elements can be dragged off the panel and onto the canvas. There is no separate run mode vs. edit mode; the game is always running and as soon as a cannon is dragged onto the surface it will start shooting little pinballs. When the user does a mouse-over on elements that are on the canvas the control point squares appear. Clicking and dragging control points allows the user to edit the parameters of each element. For example, the piece of bamboo can be rotated, and it's length and position changed. As it is made longer the "tock" sound that the bamboo makes will become deeper. You could place several pieces of bamboo in the path of the pinball, each of varying length to create a sequence of different notes.

Ideally the canvas part of the UI would be vector graphics and hence zoomable so that you could focus in on the parts of the sculpture that you are working on, and then zoom out to see the whole thing working like clockwork. Maybe there could be a "follow ball" mode when you click on a passing pinball.

Elements

The cannon is the start of every composition as it is where the pinballs originate from. Control points allow the user to modify the position, direction and power (size) of the cannon. An additional control point allows you to change the length of the spiral at the centre of the cannon, which sets the speed at which pinballs are shot out of the cannon. This corresponds to the basic tempo of a piece of music. Different cannons can have different tempos of course.

The clock has a hand which ticks with the same frequency as the nearest cannon to it. There should be some kind of visual feedback to show the user which cannon the clock is associated with. Pinballs bounce off the hand of the clock and this allows you to create pieces where pinballs go in multiple directions at different times. The clock features control points for changing the length of the hand, the position and rotation of the clock, and the number of stops on the clock's face. It might be a good idea to try having a separate spiral to control the tempo of the clock independently of any cannon. Testing will reveal which method is more intuitive and useful.

The hit clock is just like the clock, except that it only 'ticks' when a pinball strikes the centre circle. Other than that it has pretty much the same control points for size, rotation, position, and number of stops. This allows you to create more complex pieces where a ball can strike a hit-clock after a long sequence to change the direction and flow of other pinballs.

The leaf is inspired by the leaves in the Electroplankton fish-and-leaves game - it makes a plucked string sound when the stem of the leaf is struck by a pinball. The control points on the leaf allow you to change the length, rotation and position of the leaf. The length of the leaf changes the taughtness, or pitch of the string. The sound for the leaf should vary in a procedural way if it has multiple excitations in rapid succession, which goes the same for the following audible elements. An algorithm such as the Karplus-strong algorithm would work well for the the leaf, and is faily easily implemented.

The bowl contains water and makes a 'plock' sound when pinballs fall into it, and a gongish sound when struck on the sides. The bowl's position, width, and height can be changed with control points. It's width corresponds to the pitch of the 'plock' sound, and the height determines how much reverb to put on the sound. Both the width and the height determine the pitch of the gong sound that the sides of the bowl make; each might determine the pitch of one of two oscillators which are ring-modulated together.

The bamboo makes a 'tock' sound when struck by a pinball and has control points for position, rotation, width, and length. The length of the piece of bamboo determines the pitch of the tock sound, and the width determines the depth, or length of the sound.

The sphere makes a 'ting' sound like a single bar from a wind chime. The control points allow you to modify the position and size of the sphere, with the size corresponding to the pitch of the chime.

Aesthetic

In my head the game looks like a piece of traditional japanese calligraphy (above is my pretty lame attempt at that look) and the scupltures are tinkly pretty things which sound like gamelan music, or John Cage's "Six Marimbas". I can imagine users creating fully fledged pieces with multiple parts and movements which sound as fascinating and wonderful as they look.

Technology

If I was to code up this game or a prototype thereof tommorrow (it could happen!), I would use the following combination of technologies:

• The core engine would be written in Python for speed of prototyping.
• The graphical component of the engine would be implemented in Pygame or Pyglet, or maybe Pycairo for the vector graphic component if it's fast and cross platform enough.
• The physics engine would be Box2d, Chipmunk, ODE, or something similarly cross-platform and Python compatible.
• The audio backend would be implemented in Pure Data. It would be launched as a subprocess and would use the '-nogui' flag and sockets/pipes to communicate with the Python based front-end. Individual elements would each have their own Pure Data abstraction, and dynamic patching would be used to create instances of each element. Incidentally, Pd is the music engine for the recently released vide game, Spore.

All these technologies can be googled for more info.

Concluding

Some good community features such as uploading and sharing sculpture compositions would be nice, and png-embedded data files could be cool as well, so that images could be dragged from a browser into the game and loaded up instantly, and users could easily share compositions by sharing screenshots. Another cool feature might be to have elements that are touching eachother on the canvas have some kind of audio interplay such as ring-modulation between the two sounds. That kind of stuff should be experimented with after the basic prototype of the game is up and running.

Chris McCormick - Many Faces.mp3

Their music is what I'd call instrumental indie math-rock, and it rules. My own set will be electronic music consisting of some hip-hop beats and loops, then a bit of drone, and then shifting gear into experimental dubstep land. I'll probably be on at 20:30 or 21:00.

update: I am actually on from 20:00.

This will be my last gig in Perth before Moose and I head off to Europe later this year. Hope you can make it!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/13/sfxr-sound-effects-for-all/