I always liked the simplicity of music trackers. As a developer it is very appealing to think of music as a sequence of time-based repetitive events. It resembles the flow of a program written in an imperative language.
Now, what if a tracker could be scripted by some programming language to save time spent on typing and copy-pasting notes/effects in the patterns? Or, what if some AI was trained to construct rhythms and chords and melodies for you?
This is what Fugue is about.
It started as an idea for the ProductHunt hackathon and it is only the beginning of…
Glitch is a minimal environment for making algorithmic music and live coding. It uses simple arithmetic expressions as a programming language and has only a few functions to learn, yet it allows creating some interesting music pieces.
It’s been a month since I last talked about Glitch here, but it has been a very productive time, which has totally changed my vision of Glitch and its future.
And old ox makes a straight furrow
The original Glitch was written in React and ES6 and worked good enough in modern Chrome browsers. It was a quick and “trendy” way to make web apps. …
“Get Yucky” is a four-chord looping melody made from scratch using Glitch. It was written to show that music can be written with just arithmetic expressions.
At the beginning there were drums
Let’s define the tempo of the song and drop in some drum synthesizers like the ones created in the previous article.
bpm=120,kicks=seq(bpm, 1, 0),
snares=seq(bpm, 0, 1),
hats=seq(bpm*4, 0.1, 0.2, 0.1, 0.2, 0.1, 0.2, 0.2, 0.1),kick=env(0.01, 0.12, 0.3, 0.1, 0, (sin(83)-128)*kicks+128),snaretone=env(0.005, 0.02, 0.3, 0.05, 0, (sin(220)-128)*snares+128),
snarenoise=env(0.02, 0.03, 0.2, 0.04, 0, (r(15)*snares)+128),
snare = (snaretone + snarenoise + 128 — lpf(snarenoise, 100))/2,hat=env(0.01, 0.05, 0.2, 0.05, 0, r(30)*hats+128),
hat=hat+128-lpf(hat, 10000),…
Glitch is a great tool if you want to start with algorithmic music. It’s simple and straightforward. To master Glitch you only need to remember 15 functions.
But moving from bytebeat and oscillators to actual music might be difficult for newcomers. Let’s see how you can make synthesized kick drum, snare and hi-hats with just a few lines of Glitch.
Hi-hats
Hi-hats are probably the easiest ones to synthesize because they are basically white noise. It can be generated by the r() function (a random number generator). Adding an envelope to the white noise makes it sound more like a drum…
Glitch started as a Bytebeat music synthesizer. Bytebeat has some really unique features: simple concept, terse notation, dirty old-school sound. But at the same point Bytebeat is limited by its ultra-simplicity.
Many curious minds today experiment with algorithmic music composition and programmable music. In most cases this means configuring some software and learning some new programming languages.
Glitch aims to combine the simplicity of Bytebeat with the flexibility of a full-featured programmable music environment.
The core idea of Glitch is borrowed from Bytebeat — a musician enters a math expression, then Glitch evaluates it for each discrete time frame and…
Meet Glitch — a minimal, modern and easy-to-use synthesizer for Bytebeat music.
Bytebeat (sometimes known as glitch music) is a relatively new experimental genre of electronic music. If you are familiar with retro “chiptune” music you can imagine how it sounds — triangular or square waves making rhythmical scratching noises.
What’s so cool about Bytebeat music if it sounds so harsh? Mathematics. If numbers and formulas is a hard subject to you — most likely you will find Bytebeat music boring. Otherwise, let’s start making sound.
Audio engine
Glitch has no conventional musical notation — there are no notes or chords or…
