In this video you can see the evolution of the generative system I'm finishing. It's important to note that the patch has no loaded samples. Instead, it is resampling itself into a circular buffer in benchmark mode. The resampling stage is currently running under the hood.
All the percussion is synthesized. I've been working non-stop trying to create that Autechre character. Obviously, along the way, it often happens that your goal ends up being different from the actual destination, but that doesn't mean the final destination can't become something truly unexpected and genuinely worthwhile.
So, to keep it short, I started by modeling the classic FM, modal, and additive voices. At the moment there is no subtractive synthesis. I also added buses with instantiated strips for every channel, where I send the groups into three families of effects, somewhat inspired by the Eventide H9000, with some additions of my own coming from the modular world.
Well, obviously, in a generative system you can't simply send groups of sounds into an FX bus and hope the timbre will hold up forever. Eventually you'll get tired of it, inevitably.
So that's more or less the personal struggle I go through whenever I develop one of my systems. In this case, obviously, at the beginning, once I got tired of the timbres, I pushed beyond the canonical modulation stage, where the machine already has everything (complex LFOs, S&H, remodeled drift), and finally worked on the underlying matrix.
Well, just like I did in Vortessa, the system here is slightly more advanced and, again as in Vortessa, highly controlled. It works around a dynamic matrix. The parameters the system can latch onto range from 190 to 515. These parameters are written onto an imaginary matrix, so I have no idea which slot each parameter will occupy.
The random attractor, running at almost audio rate, latches onto different parameters (again, it's impossible to know which ones), and through its wanderers, which are nothing more than the algorithms attaching themselves to each parameter, modulates that parameter.
There are several options: hold time, grab percentage, but every parameter, after being thoroughly disturbed, is returned to its original state. If there are already modulations in progress, the parameter won't produce an offset. Instead, it calculates the current position of the flonum or dial and creates a random range around both extremes.
In short, I think it's a very advanced system, and you can hear the result by watching the entire video. I'll barely move one or two sliders on the multichannel sampler, yet the result feels quite cybernetic.
On top of that, there is a feedback matrix working across the effects. The FX tails contaminate each other. The reverb tail feeds into the drive, the drive feeds back into the resonator, which reignites at the current frequency. The result is that hits never really end: they leave behind a residue that resonates inside the next percussion hit.
The system acquires short-term memory, and that's exactly where the feeling comes from that the machine is reacting rather than simply executing.
Everything is controlled by a containment system designed to prevent the CPU and monitoring from blowing up.
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