emusonacid! legacy

I've heard this is being done, and I'm curious as to what people are doing. I'm going to do some cord setups with this in mind. Any ideas or techniques posted here would be fantastic. Anybody here familiar with Stephen Wolfram or Cellular Automita using an E-mu would be great!

This sounds very interesting.

The cords section is great and I love the modulation processors. I especially love the Switch source combined with a DC offset so that a sound can be radically changed when something (midi CC, velocity etc) reaches a certain level.

The emu is really only half the picture as something decent is needed to trigger voices and to change controllers. I find the sequencer inside the emu too limiting to do anything interesting. If you've got an RFX card then you can use external source of sound to trigger midi notes - for some reason a dripping tap springs to mind.

It would be great to hear your thinking behind some of your sequnce and cord setups. Keep us posted.

I'm thinking there must be ways of doing most of it in the sampler and having the sequencer play only one note or only a pulse of a group of notes to trigger a system setup in the sampler.

Tonite I'm going to try some simple ideas using Zoeos.

I'm having difficulty visualising how you could perfrom cellular automata solely using the emu. I have a brief understanding of elementary cellular automata, something that I got into in my chaos theory phase (Sierpinskis triangle), but I'm aware there are a few different types. Bascially my knowledge is a bit limitied so I apologise if it sounds like I'm talking out of my arse

Anyway, I see the emu as more of a way of displaying results from cellular automata rather than generating data. I've seen a few websites that have got some pretty interesting music made by such processes however they all seem to rely on a programming language that can generate midi notes. I think it would be difficult to make the emu react to an action it took x amount of steps ago.

I might have the wrong end of the stick here. I'm trying to picture how you could generate one of those elementary cellular automata grids and turn it into sound using only the emu. It would be easy to turn the grid into a midi file and play it on the internal sequncer however I think that would be missing the point. The hard part for me is trying to apply the rules via cords - this completely baffles me.

Anyway, you might be trying to do something completely different so please feel free to tell me to shut the fub up. Either way I'm glad you've posted this topic up as it's made me look at the emu in a completely different way.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for but i'm having an nice result with this.

pink-->Lag0in +99%
lag0--->lfo1trg +99%
CkWhle-->Lfo1trg +99% (match the bpm in the arp section with the clock you send)
lfo1--->pitch +xx%
lfo2--->amp +99% (lower the volume of the sample)
ck16th-->lfo2trg +99%

lfo1- random,free run, 4.12 (+-100bpm)
lfo2- random,free run, 4.12

more chaotic:
white instead of pink
lag0-->amp +99% (lag at 3)
lfo1-->switch +99%
switch-->pitch
dc-->switch

What areyou guys talking about... What is cellular autamota and what is Adam B trying to do?

I am so confused

but... it might be fun

snh

Nicholas Frechette wrote:Not sure if this is what you're looking for but i'm having an nice result with this.

Just wondering what kind of samples you're using this with?

As for cellular automata... I'm just interested, not that much of a mathematician. Though I did speak with the makers of zoeos yesterday and they said they're hoping to implement an algorithimc musical component in the coming months.

One thing I've noticed about "alogrithmic" music is that a lot of people implementing it don't usually approach the musical language in a good way. A major component of this music is the implementation on scale and voicing by the composer. We've also seen that simpler is always better. We've done a lot of dice/cointoss stuff using Stephen Wolfram type systems, and then limited the results to certain modes or scales. I myslef am interested in using only harmonic components or "upper partials" as a sound source. It's to bad the emu isn't an additive synth.

More to come.

sampleandhold wrote:What areyou guys talking about... What is cellular autamota and what is Adam B trying to do?

I am so confused

but... it might be fun

snh

Basically we're looking into a newer for of composition wherein the compostion component is in setting up some kind of musical "system" to generate music based on a set of "rules" that you as a composer put into place. This can be the simples set of rules or can get quite mathematical. One way to start is by getting some dice and using one to represent notes, the other to represent rythm. Now you pick which note values and rythm/silence values each number and start rolling. This works well with pentatonic and modal scales. Just write it all down. Then you can start doing variations on this technique, or making complex software versions in something like Reaktor. The part that really matters is how you use the results. The input could be dice, or it could be the number output of a fractal.

Hope this helps, I'm a total newbie at this stuff too.

Just wondering what kind of samples you're using this with?

I used a simple triangle wave for the pitch mod, changed the destination to ampvol for a long noisy sample and also tried a kick with the sretrig. The amp mod was the most interesting, with the pitch mod only a couple of pass where worth resampling.

fuck it man.. use max/msp, or something....use it to trigger notes and cc's from the emu.. it's a world of obscure fun, if somewhat incoherent....to my mind algorhythmic composition uses some sort of equation/numbers as its core (if you see what i mean).. the emu's self generating powers lie only in it's pink and white noise function. which is random and therfore incoherent... what i'm trying to say is basicaly use some sort of weird sequencer in conjunction with the emu... if you have a mac there are a couple of free ones about eg super-collider................... ummmm anyone know anything about "lucy tunning" with the emu??.... i'm probably typing shite. have been drinking and probably didn't read the post's proper.... but i dig some "algorhythmic" music. check out mileece. BEUTIFUL.

The emu has got quite a few more random generators Krand1/2 and I think you could also use crossfade random. The internal apreggiator can also be set to random.

What has got me thinking recently is although they are completely random they can be tamed. For example a assign a krand value to the speed of a free running LFO (Sus4 trip), now assign this LFO to pitch amount 38. This will give random results when you hit the key however they will give a musical sounding result because Sus4 rules are applied. Another thing would be to set up random crossfade on a selection of notes that play a certain scale. The order of notes would be random however the scale would give it some kind of structure.

If you combine the last example with the internal arpeggiator set to random you could really start getting something sounding musical yet completely random.

For example you say take 5 midi notes on the keyboard (C1, C#1, D1, D#1 and E1) and to each one assign 3 seperate voices which are set up to randomly crossfade every keypress. Each voice uses the same piano sample. For keys C1, C#1, D1 and D#1 you tune the 3 voices in exactly the same way. Voice one is tuned at 0, Voice 2 is at +3 and voice 3 is at +7 (Root, minor 3rd and 5th). For the 3 voices in E1 you change the pitch of the voices to +1, +4 and +8 the same as C1 ti D#1 however it's a semitone higher.

Now turn on the arpeggitor, set it to random and hold down the keys C1 to E1. Most of the time it will play the piano sample pitched at 0 or 3 or 7 however there is a one fifth possibilty it will play the E1 voices which are a semitone higher.

My point is even though the generated notes are completley random there are conditions and rules added that can give the output some kind of structure. There would also be a 1 in 5 chance that something different would happen.

Hope that makes sense.