Generative VST Plugins

With considerable help from Codex, I've built a bunch of these. They are over here on GitHub : code, docs.

This demo on YouTube features a bunch of them wired via sends in Reaper. Some of the sounds were made in the box, some created in modular. But all the midi notes have been generated algorithmically.

The bass line, as in the unintelligible score above was created by Ground :

Here is a description of the algorithms.

A Tune Created for AI

A few days ago, after a morning in the music room I had a track I thought was ok, wanted to upload to YouTube, but couldn't help thinking it really needed some visuals to go with it. Last year, with the help of Claude, I made Hillside, a set of generative visualizations for a set of tracks I'd recorded (live here). It runs in a browser, canvas-based JS. So I dug that out and spent many hours with Codex trying to get it to render to mp4. It really was a gruelling session. Codex went down many blind alleys to get anything properly rendering. In the process managed to mess up the original generative algorithm. But it finally managed to get it to render one of the visuals as a reasonable vid (result here).

I couldn't help anthropomorphising Codex a bit. It'd put so much effort in. So then I asked it to make the kind of generative video setup you'd like to see, tell me what you want and I'll make the sounds. Twenty minutes later Codex had built something, and gave me a brief.

Tides

Tides is intended for quiet, spacious, late-night ambient techno.

Music Brief

• Around 95-115 BPM, with a slow pulse but not sleepy.
• Deep rounded kick, soft sub-bass, and lots of negative space.
• Small delayed percussion clicks, filtered noise, and occasional metallic ticks.
• Warm pads or drones that slowly change harmony.
• No huge drops; more like pressure, drift, and small details emerging from darkness.

There was also a description of the visualization etc, here : tides.md

This morning I created something vaguely along the lines of the brief. I've been having a lot of fun recently creating VST plugins with Codex, so this was a good opportunity to try them out. The sounds are about 50/50 the Downspout Plugins and the modular rack (including neurotic firmware on a module to give the bass a bit of grit).

Then tried Codex's new visualization renderer. Took about an hour and the result was a bit disappointing. Some expanding circles and some very faint wavy lines.

But I saw the potential... Ok, I asked for the circles to be wavy, the faint lines to be more visible, and please add some procedurally generated sea creatures.

Another hour later, this was the result Tidepool. It looks like it might feature in a 20th century kids TV animation. But I'm happy with it.

Novel VST Plugins

I've had a lot of fun over the past year or so doing music experiments with the help of AI assistants. I've had a variety of targets including native apps, browser-based runtimes, a Daisy Seed Eurorack module and lv2 plugins. Most of the material is around Flues on GitHub. All open source, natch.

I have been using the results quite a lot in the music room, in fact the lv2s played a significant role in the making of my new album, Attone.

Attone

I have released a new album, using CD Baby as a distributor so it's now available on all major streaming music outlets.

• Bandcamp
• YouTube
• Spotify

If you remember what a CD-R is, you can burn your own copy using the source files of Attone on GitHub.

Postcraft Update

This is a test.

Rather wonderfully both Codex and Claude have a decent grip on how Transmissions, my pipeliney thing, works. I'm not entirely sure what's being used under the hood, but I did get Claude to create a Skill for creating Transmissions (what I call my pipelines). Claude was then able to build me a feed aggregator using Transmissions as the engine.

I've been using Transmissions-based apps for publishing my blog content for a while now. The source content I write as markdown files in my local filesystem. One app pushes this content off to a remote SPARQL store (Fuseki on my server), another app renders the content as HTML, yet another creates the index pages.

This works ok but an outstanding issue was that each time I ran these apps, every single blog post was processed again. So I just got Codex to modify the pipelines to keep a note of changes. It chose to use a local JSON file for keeping the cache info, which is fine by me. Everything looks like it still functions ok. My tests are a bit haphazard, the best test is to run the thing. For which I need a new blog post. So,

This is a test.