GTZ Habitrail

Until I come up with some­thing bet­ter, the first tool men­tioned here (in the first para­graph) is called “GTZ Habitrail”.

(the rest of that post describes a dif­fer­ent project, which has a long way to go)

Habi­trails, as I under­stand them, are a three dimen­sion­al maze that one cre­ates for their pets to live in and explore. You don’t con­trol with your pets direct­ly, but their deci­sions are guid­ed by the con­straints you’ve set forth. So, it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of interaction.

I’ve nev­er had one, so I don’t know how accu­rate that is, but it does makes a nice metaphor to describe the tool.

Any­way, it came out much bet­ter than expect­ed, and per­forms well with­in its intend­ed parameters.

But more inter­est­ing, by cloning the MIDI source over sev­er­al octaves, we get some­thing close to a melod­ic instru­ment, rem­i­nis­cent of the Suzu­ki Omni­chord.

Here’s a quick exper­i­ment with that, mapped to an XY pad on my iPhone (via Tou­chOSC).

Tou­chOSC solo from GreaterThanZe­ro on Vimeo.

The exper­i­ment was less about tech­nol­o­gy as psy­chol­o­gy. I had the com­put­er select­ing chords in a ran­dom order, and I tried to cre­ate a melody that would lead you through them, despite the fact that I had no con­trol over the pro­gres­sion, nor lit­tle idea where it was going. It’s an inter­est­ing exer­cise. It makes you stop think­ing about spe­cif­ic notes, and con­cen­trate more on the con­tours of your melod­ic line.

I think it actu­al­ly becomes lis­ten­able at about the 2 minute mark, which is some­thing I’m both proud of and hor­ri­fied by.

After mak­ing that video, I spent the fol­low­ing week­end refin­ing the con­trols. I built a ver­sion that drove three syn­the­siz­ers inde­pen­dent­ly, so you can jump between instru­ments in inter­lock­ing melodies, or let them har­mo­nize. I record­ed sev­er­al takes on a demo, but despite these advance­ments, it just was­n’t as musi­cal. These takes are now deleted.

I’m going to rethink and revis­it that idea, and per­haps a new video will come out of that. Stay tuned.

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