Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of discovering Oliver Bown’s wonderful sound art library, Beads. Beads is a library for creating and analyzing audio in Processing or Java, and it is head-and-shoulders above the other sound libraries that are available for Processing. From the ground up, Beads is made for musicians [...]

This is such a bizarre, unique little project that I had to post it. The sound in the video is really quiet, so turn your speakers up.

Each point on the clothe is responsible for one sine wave instrument. It’s position and movement cause the pitch of that particular instrument to change. The counter at the [...]

Black Allegheny is one of the first albums made up entirely of swarm generated music. The album was created using a swarm-controlled sampler called Becoming, which was programmed by the composer.

Imperceptible Time by Evan X. Merz

Becoming is an algorithmic composition program written in java, that builds upon some of John Cage’s frequently employed [...]

This piece unites Cage’s conception of graph music with ideas from the field of swarm intelligence. The software uses a graph of notated musical fragments to generate a score in real-time, for live performance. It does this by allowing a swarm of virtual insects to crawl over the graph, choosing new fragments with each move.

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Earlier this year, we looked at how to read and write wav files in C++ and VB.Net, and C/C++ is really the natural choice for this kind of file IO (for a number of reasons that we won’t go into here). Nonetheless, not everyone uses C or C++ for computer music software. Increasingly, [...]