Chaos - - The Chaotic Music Generator

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the DTjanitor is grateful to Tom B. for his Chaotic contribution and we acknowledge his approval of our including same herein.

included subdirectories:

• DemoFiles
• support

and the contents of support/docs/doc.txt follow:

What is Chaos

Chaos was originally intended as a pitch tracking midi improvisor which would listen to incoming pitches on the microphone port and play corresponding notes on a midi device. Due to the often bizarre timberal qualities of the input, poor calibration of the tracking algorithms and the fact that I didnt have a microphone good enough not to pick up the output of the program through the nearby speakers, Chaos emerged.

1. An indigo/indigo2/indy with an R4000 chip (the fft library for 5.2 is only compiled -mips2, booo hiss)
2. A Macintosh compatible midi box like the Midiator (I use the Altech MidiFace)
3. A midi device to make sound with. (I use a Roland Soundcanvas)
4. A microphone which should be plugged into the microphone port of the SGI. (preferably with a nice long cord)

1. Upon startup, the first thing you should do is set the current midi port value (Menu in upper right hand corner.) For some reason, setting this after loading Chaos files may produce strange results in the application. (I Hope to fix this soon.)
2. Make sure you have read/write permisions on the port you choose for Midi. Example: chmod a+rw /dev/ttyd1
3. Make sure you dont use a port currently in use by either 'getty' (check out /etc/inittab) or a tablet driver. You will get an error message from Chaos when it tries to open ports which are already in use.
4. Have the microphone plugged in (Use 'apanel' to set input levels appropriately).
5. Shut the door to your office before you turn up the volume on your midi box, things are going to get wierd.
6. Hit the open button and browse through the demo files. For proper effect, you can place the microphone near the speakers, so that a proper butterfly feedback effect occurs.
7. Experiament with whistling into the microphone to produce input to the algorithm. A sucking whistle is prefered as most microphones dont react well to large gusts of air.

Chaos can control 16 channels of output at a time. Each of the 16 buttons at the top of the interface each control a single channel. Pressing down on a button activates the editor for that channel.

Inside each channel there are 4 separate edit panels avaliable.

    Midi Settings - Effects the instrument used and velocity of notes
    FFT Settings  - Controls the basic Fast Fourier interpretation
    Note Control  - Gives you some control over which notes pop
                    out of the beast.
    Time Control  - Controls the rhythm of your composition

Each control follows a standard and quite bizarre interface. At this time 2 different modes are available

    - HI/LO     - Lets you choose a high and low value for 
                  a settings.  Random numbers are then chosen
                  which fall between the 2 values.
    - OSCILATE  - Lets you choose base and peak range and then
                  have the oscilator oscilate between them.
                  Does take some getting used to.
    - FILE      - NOT CURRENTLY ACTIVE
    - SCRIPT    - NOT CURRENTLY ACTIVE

    MIDI SETTINGS
    Velocity	 - The velocity of notes that are played by the
                   channel.
    Midi Channel - The midi channel used for output (1-16)
    Stereo Pan   - Affects the balace of the channel so
                   that notes can move in left/right space.

    FFT SETTINGS
    Midi Base    - Note value base added to value calculated by 
		   spectrum (Really just a transpose/translation)
    Midi Scale   - Scale value multiplied by spectrum note.

    NOTE CONTROL
    loclip       - Sets a value for the lowest note playable
                   by the channel.
    hiclip       - Sets a value for the highest note playable
                   by the channel.
    Key          - Sets the key of scale being played 
		   (0 = C1, 12 = C2 etc)
    Scale Menu   - Sets a scale, current choices are : All notes, 
		   Pentatonic, Lydian, C Major, C Sharp, and Blues

    TIME CONTROL
    duration     - Controls the duration of a note when it is played
    beat         - Controls the spacing between notes played by 
		   the channel

You can add instrument names for any midi device you might have by simply editing a text file with the following structure:

PROGRAM# NAME

Example:

1 Piano
15 Guitar
24 DogBarking
Place the file in the directory Chaos/support/devices and it will be added to the device menu at startup. If you create a new device lists, please email them to me at ben@ifx.com so that we can distribute them with the next version of the software.

You may contact the author regarding ideas for future controls and bug reports, but please include at least one Unique Chaos Composition :)

Enjoy,
Tom Benoist - ben@ifx.com