I wrote this program over the Christmas holiday of 1995/96, as part of my music degree at York University. Most of the initial development was done on the PC, but I built the final version on the Atari ST because of the easy access to MIDI I/O, and because that was the system most easily available within the music department. But now that Allegro has MIDI input functions, I can make a PC version with proper MIDI support as well, so here it is!
The Pattern Processor takes a number of musical phrases or "patterns", which you can record in realtime from a MIDI keyboard, and modifies them through a range of mutation functions based on standard musical devices like transposition and inversion. The output material will gradually deviate further and futher away from your original inputs, and this process can be controlled (to some extent: it doesn't work nearly as well as I had originally hoped :-) by feedback provided using the pitch bend wheel.
1998 update: added an option to log the generated music into a format zero MIDI file, as well as just squirting it out to an external synth. I don't have ready access to an ST compiler any more, so this feature is only included in the PC executable, but the code should still build happily on the ST. If by some miracle anyone is actually using this program on the ST and wants logging functions for it, a simple recompile will hopefully be enough to provide them.
There are a lot of problems with this system, but every now and then it manages to produce something pretty cool, particularly when it comes to complex rhythmic and textural material, so I think it turned out quite well considering how experimental the whole idea was.
You can do whatever the hell you like with this program. If you want to pay me large sums of money for it, that is perfectly acceptable...
This includes source plus both DOS and Atari executables.
Back to my homepage