Your feedback about tempo is *exactly* the kind of thing I want to hear. I’m never quite sure how obvious this is but, when I started Elysium, I had no musical background or knowledge whatsoever (never played an instrument) so I made decisions largely as they seemed to make sense to me at the time and, of course, some of those decisions have worked out poorly.

Given that I am interested in tempo syncing with the host (and that this has implications for how layer tempo works) I shall certainly give some thought to how the tempo relationships between layers could be expressed.

I wouldn’t want to remove the possibility of free-running layers but I can see myself how it would be useful to be able to vary the tempo of one layer and have the rest vary their tempo, in different ratios, lockstep to it.

I’m slightly bogged down with a crash problem on 10.5 (but I have seen your bug report, thanks) but hope to work on these issues soon. In the meantime, since it was very simple to do, I have implemented one of your requests. Here’s a teaser for a forthcoming version:

http://screencast.com/t/2ONdDdMWOkrj

Matt.

Also, since you’re welcome to composerly feedback, to have the various layers be *completely* independent isn’t musically useful, because (and all but the most avant garde of composers would agree with this) even the most complicated (but playable) rhythmic relationships are always going to be expressed as ratios with simple integers: 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, etc. Therefore, if you offer the possibility of locking additional layers to one of those ratios, the rhythmic possibilities become exponentially more interesting. I imagine that also makes the tempo control issues simpler, no? Because no matter how the tempo changes, the ratio relationship between layers wouldn’t change.

A tempo sync’d layer will have a tempo relative to the incoming tempo. That might be 1:1 or it might be expressed in other ratios. An LFO in this case would probably affect the ratio somehow.

Other layers could remain independent and run at their own tempo.

I have in mind to add the concept of a ‘master clock’ to Elysium to drive the layers (at the moment they are too independent) that should make it easier to slave Elysium to external clock sources as well as improving consistency in timing between layers.

Skip is a token that you apply to a cell like generate or note. It’s quite simple to use, add one in the path of a playhead and play with the skip value and you will see what it does. You can add an LFO to the skip value.

I’ve considered adding wormholes in the past primarily as a means to transfer tokens between layers rather than between cells of a single layer (although I see no reason why that shouldn’t be possible also) but it’s not a priority.

Other people have asked in the past for control over the colour scheme and that’s probably something I will do. Transparency also, assuming it’s easy to make the underlying window transparent as well.

Beyond that as someone who is a working composer though I am interested to hear your feedback about how it could develop as a ~musical~ tool. If you have more ideas along those lines I’d be keen to listen.

Matt.

Again, of course you’re right about Logic: I just need to set the clock to transmit on all ports. But when I think more about this, I recognize that you’ve got a conundrum with syncing, don’t you… given that there’s the possibility of controlling the tempo in Elysium with an LFO, if Logic is the master clock, wouldn’t that override the LFO? Alternatively, you’d need to send that LFO to Logic’s transport. How’d you’d do either one, I don’t know.

As for the Perpetuum Mobile comment, yes, I was referring to the potential for numbing repetition. But today, I played with applying several LFOs to a number of parameters (tempo, transposition, ghost tones, etc) and found the results becoming quite elegant (until it crashed – I sent a crash log to your website).

I’ll need to explore the ‘skip’ option. From your description, I can’t envision precisely how that will work (I understand it in Nodal — in Nodal it’s called a “wormhole.” Nice, right?), but it might become clearer in practice.

I meant to make mention in the main post about the possibility of scripting in Elysium, which is something I have no experience with but might be up for experimenting with. In part I meant to bring it up because it provides a segue to a discussion/description of Noatikl, which really seems to require scripting to get the program to produce something other than ambient music.

One thought I’d had about your triads, could be good or bad, but in any case I imagine it’d be easy given what’s already in the program, is to make an LFO for option for it.

I hope you enjoyed your lunch!

~Charlie

This functionality is, so far, little developed but it’s something I am working on at present to expose an API that can be allow the composer to have more influence over their composition.

In a more advanced GUI app you might have timelines and visual editing but I don’t have the time or (presently) the skill for that so I’m going to expose it as code.

For example something I need is to be able to have a generate pulse with every beat, then go to sleep for some number of beats. Right now there isn’t really any way to do that from the UI.

However a simple layer script would be able to check the beat and decide whether to enable or disable any particular generator on a cell.

You could also imagine how such scripts might *add or remove tokens or layers*. For example you could probably write a script to play a peverse form of life, adding & removing generators to cells depending on the number of active playheads.

The possibilities, if you know a little Javascript (the API will be quite simple) should be quite interesting.

Ok, time for lunch.

Matt

You’re right in that the harmonic table does place certain constraints on how you work. However look also into the skip token which I added for another user. This allows you to jump the playhead over a number of cells in one move and can allow you to create irregular movements.

Something I plan to work on quite soon is an expansion of the triad playing into something more akin to a chord sequencer. Right now you can have Elysium play a single, fixed, triad instead of a note. This turns out to be quite boring.

I want to be allow users to create patterns of chords that notes can sequence through although clearly this feature needs some thought to be properly useful and my knowledge of harmonic theory is very limited. I’ll be looking for feedback from users to drive this kind of development.

Okay, I’m done now

Matt

This is a key reason why I pursued both control over probability and LFO’s so early in Elysium’s development – to respond to this issue. MIDI triggers (to allow some combination of human performance and generative work) is another feature I added recently to assist with this and Mutex groups (the ability to setup OR relationships among tokens) is a feature I am working on right now.

I wish I could work on Elysium full-time but, alas, I must pay the bills

Matt

More good points. Okay the ‘tempo sync’ checkbox should really be grayed out (or, for now, removed) since it relates to a forthcoming feature and does nothing.

You’re right that, at the moment, there is no sync between Logic (or any host) and Elysium. If you want to record MIDI in you have to start the Logic transport, start Elysium and then shunt the resulting MIDI region to fit where it would have started if there had been sync.

However this is an area of active interest for me and, just this weekend, I have figured out how to at least have the Elysium player start & stop with the Logic transport. That will be implemented in a forthcoming release.

Note that this should not require any use of IAC as Logic can be configured to broadcast MIDI clock.

Elysium has a hierarchical structure. If you set the tempo dial in the player inspector this will set the tempo for all layers. However, for any particular layer, you can override the tempo dial and set a tempo specific to that layer. Are you sure you’re setting it in the right place? And that you haven’t overridden it? If not then maybe there is a new bug.

Slaving tempo is more complicated for a number of reasons. First the MIDI clock method employs a series of ‘clock’ messages which is not especially compatible with how Elysium was designed. Second Elysium’s layers have a certain independence so some kind of ratio/scaling system would need to be introduced.

In terms of layer use I introduced a feature before 1.0 called MIDI override. If you want to create multiple independent patterns then separate layers is the way to go. However if your goal was to be able to trigger different instruments, at different point, from one layer then look into MIDI override (it’s in the Note inspector).

This allows you, for any note, to specify the probability that it will trigger for any of MIDI channels #1 through #8.

I use this to introduce the probability of hits from specific instruments at certain points. Without needing another layer.

My last comment is to say that Elysium is not a simple application although I do strive not to make it any more complicated than necessary. One of the 1.0 goals was to update the documentation and to create some tutorial videos. But I just wasn’t getting around to it and didn’t want to keep holding up the release.

At some point, when I have more time, I’ll do both.

Regards,

Matt

I downloaded an update this morning from 1.0 to 1.0.0 and the LFOs are working now. (And FYI, I’m using OS X 10.6.1.)

I could have sworn that prior to this update that the tempo dial affected all layers when changed in one. If not, what’s the tempo sync checkbox for?

As for the sync issues, I am still having them. Yes, I was using the IAC. Of course you’re right, I can get the MIDI into Logic directly through Core Audio (I wasn’t doing it that way yesterday). But today, as I look at the MIDI data through MIDI Pipe, all I see coming out of Elysium is noteon/off messages and channel info. There’s no start/stop messages.

So, doesn’t that mean Elysium needs to slave to Logic? and if so, Logic has to send the start/stop and clock info from Logic to Elysium, right? So, doesn’t that mean that some conduit (like IAC) is necessary to get that data into Elysium? Or am I missing something?

Many thanks,
~Charlie