When I’m not drawing or coloring, I like to play with music – so today I thought it would be fun to show you an iPad app I’ve been using to make evolving generative music.
Xythesizr is an app developed by Yuri Turov and it allows musical phrases to grow, develop and pass away according to rules of life that you can pick and choose. It reminds me a lot of the way coloring patterns develop as I provide you with a set of lines and you choose a set of colors and then discover your own path through the page.
The rules in Xynthesizr are based on whether a brightly lit dot has neighbors and you can choose from a couple of widely known cellular growth rules or make up your own. In the video I’m going to show you, I used a rule called “Live Free Or Die” where a dot will die if it has no neighbors at all, and if you have an empty space with exactly two neighbors you’ll sprout a brand new baby dot.
You can also control how long you want your musical phrase to be (I used 16 beats, after which the grid updates and decides where dots will be born and who is going to vanish) and how much of a piano keyboard that you will use for your sounds (mine uses 5 notes that form a pleasing pentatonic scale.)
While that may sound a bit complicated, Xythesizr is beautifully simple in action. The main thing is to work with fairly small sized areas for simpler sounds, or use all of the page if you want something really complex. You can see that my 16 x 5 sized musical area is just a small part of the available space.
Take a look and listen to this clip, and I think you’ll see why I am so fascinated by this musical and pretty app. Thank you Yuri for a beautiful way to make music!
Xynthesizr in action from Angie Grace on Vimeo.
For those that discover this blog post because they are looking for more info on Xynthesizr, here are some pictures so that you can duplicate the settings I used and get the same evolving tune.
Here’s the initial pattern of dots I painted in the grid:
Here’s the sequencer settings where you pick the growth rules:
And here’s the settings I used for my synthesizer sounds. I like this one because you can hear all the notes nicely, and there a nice sound on the down beat whenever the player head goes back to the beginning of the musical phrase.
If you like listening to evolving background music while you color, Xynthesizr is available in the iTunes App Store. My copy cost me $6.99.