Behold the power of the Web: composition ideas become a tool, a tool becomes a means for even casual users sharing musical sketches, and a browser toy can be a window into a Turkish sound artist breeding musical DNA like some people breed strains of flowers.
Otomata is a simple generative online grid-based sequencer, owing to a number of step sequencers and Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-on, with some beautiful circular visualizations of the resulting sounds. I’m late in posting it, but in a way, that’s a good thing – in the time that this sequencer has spread around the Web, it’s spawned a small army of casual musicians producing their own videos and patterns.
And that brings me to an observation. In all the discussion of “apps” versus the Web – a discussion as old as the network itself, having appeared as “cloud computing” and various other forms before – people may be missing the point. Right now, Otomata is not an app, though iPhone/iPad and Android versions are reportedly in the works. It runs as a Flash file, which gives pretty much anyone access to it (including the majority of people on the planet who still don’t have either an iOS or Android device).
But it’s Web sharing that’s already making it powerful – people sending around links, sharing creations, and showing friends. App or not, the Web is what makes software successful these days, through YouTube views, blog posts like this one (ahem), and even casual “look what’s on my screen” sharing that results in the exchange of a URL anyone with a browser can run. Flash may not be the best rich tool the Web has ever seen, but it’s only the means to an end – the end being getting things in a connected browser.
Want further evidence? Look no further than the Facebook page, or better yet, open discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/otomata/
Great design, embodying musical sense in the structure of the tool itself, makes this a hit. And for that, you can thank “computational sound artist” Batuhan Bozkurt of Istanbul. His musical expression is generally procedural by nature, expressed as a set of rules in compositional form. Check out his terrific video on this work, as built in the open source tool SuperCollider.
If you can tear yourself away from playing with this wonderful toy, you can get deep into genetic code for musical composition and spectacular SuperCollider creation.
Rapid iteration? Quick contagian? Generational evolution? Hmmm… sounds a bit like what’s happening on a larger level as creations like this spread around the Web. But it’s a heck of a lot more fun than genetic engineering … or the plague. So play away, Internets.
You was using it as a tradition sequencer, because you was not letting any of the notes hit each other to change the sequence.
Check the remix I posted, I only added one more note, but now the patterns change, and evolve.
Re: Otomata
Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 10:28 pm
by legend4ry
I done that to start off with but I genuinely just like the sound of it haha.. Its an interesting concept and might actually start sampling some of the random pattens.
Re: Otomata
Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 10:55 pm
by alphacat
Just doing my part to keep you all thoroughly distracted, whatever you're doing.
3za wrote:
MIDI out?
from the site:
"Q: MIDI Output? OSC output?
A: I will look into my possibilities for doing this. I will make a standalone version of this at some point which will emit OSC and MIDI. A VST and AU version might follow. These will take time. Sorry."
Re: Otomata
Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 11:08 pm
by Ongelegen
Very cool stuff!
Re: Otomata
Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 11:16 pm
by nowaysj
Can just record the audio, and convert that into midi, deedo.
Even more geek fun - you can alter the compositions by altering the characters in the string. So from Zeek's composition above, change some numbers and...
