Orfeo 32

Press space or the gold obol. Touch a diamond to light a step; touch it again for a slide (legato, with glide), and again to clear it. The tabs above the grid switch the lane you're drawing: drag across the bars to paint notes, accents, probabilities, ratchets, two free lanes T and M that you can patch anywhere, and each step'sduration. Every lane has its own length and clock divider, so a 5-step accent lane over a 7-step note lane over 32 gates takes a long time to repeat.

The voice is a complex oscillator whose modulator FMs, ring-modulates or syncs the carrier, then awavefolder, a multimode filter, and a low pass gate modelled on a vactrol (it opens in milliseconds and closes slowly and unevenly). Sources can be added under it: a sub, four colours of noise including a drifting shortwave radio, a tangle of cross-coupled triangle cores, a plucked string, and your microphone.

Drag from an uscita to an ingresso to patch a cable, then set its amount in the list. Seventeen sources include the contour, two function generators that can cycle, a synced LFO, fluctuating and stepped random with a probability distribution, a shift register that sometimes flips a bit, the two free lanes, the plates' pressure and XY, the rollers, and colonia: the block entropy of the Game of Life behind this page.

Armonia chooses a chord every bar (or faster) by one of fifteen rules and sings it on the choir, or arpeggiates it. Set the melody to read note dell'accordo and the lead follows the harmony. Scrivi il contrappunto writes a second voice above your sequence that obeys Fux: consonances only, no parallel or hidden fifths and octaves, perfect consonances at both ends. The rules only ever look at neighbouring notes, so the best line is found by dynamic programming over pairs of notes in O(n·k³) time. That, and the finite state of everything else here, is why the stamp saysP.

The pedals are rivers. Each has a footswitch, a ramp that sweeps the knobs you choose on its back (dip switches) as a one-way ramp, a bounce, or a sweep that follows how loud you play, and a polarity dip that decides which way. Drag them to reorder the chain. Stige is a looper that is always listening: press cattura to hold the last bars and play them at another speed or backwards; with its auto dip it keeps renewing itself from the recent past.

Invoca un dono and three gods each offer a gift from their domain: Zeus strikes the modulator, Poseidon moves the filter like a tide, Dionysus gets the sequencer drunk, Chaos unmakes the oscillator. Gifts come in four rarities, and sometimes two gods offer one together. Calore turns up the heat on everything at once.

Switch on la colonia scrive and at every loop one row of the living background is folded into thirty-two gates: the rhythm is whatever the automaton is doing under the panel. Nutri la colonia does the reverse: every note drops a glider into it. Each pattern slot carries a sigil grown from its contents, the way every post carries one grown from its title. Not everything is in this manual; some things only happen if you look back.

1. Funzioni (Functional Markov chain). W. Piston, Harmony (1941; 5th ed. rev. M. DeVoto, 1987): Table of Usual Root Progressions.
2. Basso fondamentale (Fundamental bass). J.-Ph. Rameau, Traité de l’harmonie (1722).
3. Sintassi generativa (Generative syntax). M. Rohrmeier, “Towards a generative syntax of tonal harmony”, J. Mathematics and Music 5(1), 2011, 35–53.
4. Passeggiata PLR (Neo-Riemannian walk). R. Cohn, “Introduction to Neo-Riemannian Theory”, J. Music Theory 42(2), 1998, 167–180.
5. Ciclo esatonico (Hexatonic cycle (PL)). R. Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems…”, Music Analysis 15(1), 1996, 9–40.
6. Ciclo ottatonico (Octatonic cycle (PR)). R. Cohn, J. Music Theory 42(2), 1998; after Riemann’s Schritt/Wechsel.
7. Condotta parsimoniosa (Efficient voice leading). D. Tymoczko, “The Geometry of Musical Chords”, Science 313(5783), 2006, 72–74.
8. Arco di tensione (Tonal pitch space arc). F. Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (OUP, 2001); Lerdahl & Krumhansl, Music Perception 24(4), 2007.
9. Passi da gigante (Coltrane changes). D. Demsey, “Chromatic Third Relations in the Music of John Coltrane”, Annual Review of Jazz Studies 5, 1991.
10. Armonia negativa (Negative harmony). E. Levy, A Theory of Harmony (SUNY Press, 1985).
11. Quarte sovrapposte (Quartal planing). V. Persichetti, Twentieth-Century Harmony (Norton, 1961), ch. 3.
12. Trasposizione limitata (Modes of limited transposition). O. Messiaen, Technique de mon langage musical (Leduc, 1944).
13. Spettro armonico (Spectral harmony). G. Grisey, Partiels (1975); T. Murail, Contemporary Music Review 24(2–3), 2005.
14. Otonale / utonale (Partch hexads). H. Partch, Genesis of a Music (1949; 2nd ed. Da Capo, 1974).
15. Consonanza sensoriale (Sensory dissonance). Plomp & Levelt, JASA 38(4), 1965, 548–560; W. Sethares, JASA 94(3), 1993, 1218–1228.
16. Trova la tonalità. C. L. Krumhansl & E. J. Kessler, Psychological Review 89(4), 1982; C. L. Krumhansl, Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (OUP, 1990).
17. Contrappunto. J. J. Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), trans. A. Mann as The Study of Counterpoint (Norton, 1965).
18. Melodia attesa. P. von Hippel & D. Huron, “Why do skips precede reversals?”, Music Perception 18(1), 2000, 59–85; D. Huron, Sweet Anticipation (MIT Press, 2006).
19. Melodia 1/f. R. F. Voss & J. Clarke, “‘1/f noise’ in music: Music from 1/f noise”, JASA 63(1), 1978, 258–263.
20. Continuatore. F. Pachet, “The Continuator: Musical Interaction With Style”, J. New Music Research 32(3), 2003, 333–341.
21. Euclide. G. Toussaint, “The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms”, Bridges, 2005.
22. Tonnetz. L. Euler, Tentamen novae theoriae musicae (1739); drawn here as neo-Riemannian theory draws it.