landscapes

Concept Rendering:

KiCad frontpanel pcb rendering of prototype:

 Landscapes_proto_front_kicad

 

 

landscapes is a musical pattern generator. It invites you to literally evolve musical structures out of either random sequences or musical data you tap into the device.
The idea of control is questioned here – instead of setting notes one by one, you rather listen, crossbreed, allow mutation, listen again…
once the machine comes up with a sequences you like, you can store them, so that they become ‘parents’ for the next iteration.

 

By default, landscapes initializes with 64 random patterns, each one of 128 steps on 4 cv and gate channels.
You can browse them using the bottom fader.
Two uppermost faders allow you to limit what currently is played back from the selected pattern, by setting the beginning and end steps.
Once you encounter something interesting, use one of the four buttons above the bottom slider, to store what is currently playing as a ‘parent’.
At this point, if you press the ‘evolve’ button, the musical data of the stored patterns will be crossbred.
You can introduce ‘mutation’ to this process, and it can be adjusted per channel.
Mutation is a random variation around the given musical data.

 

Lets think of an example:

Assuming you stored two ‘parents’, with no 0% mutation assigned to all 4 channels, evolving will result in 64 new musical patterns,
out of which 2 will be exact copies of the ‘parents’.
The rest will have various degrees of similarity to both parents.
Perhaps 4 notes of one of the parents will be followed by 6 of the other one and so on.
Once ‘mutation’ is introduced, both cv and gate information will tend to deviate from the ‘parent’ data,
up to the point of the offspring becoming barely recognizable.
But isn’t it how new things come to existence?

 

Instead of starting with a random set of patterns, you can tap in yours
it works similar to sh-101 or more specifically to roland csq-600…
that means you are ready to listen how a bastard child of BOC, Vince Clark and Juan Atkins sounds like.

 

The landscapes development is funded by the Austria Wirtschafts Service

 

November 24 2016


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