The Generative Suite

Ten browser instruments that generate MIDI rather than sound. Each takes a different generative idea — cellular automata, slime mould, drawn curves, step sequencing, rhythm algorithms, coupled pendulums, mechanisms, chaotic attractors, physical models — and points it at your hardware. They come in two generations: six on the first shell, four on a second, tighter one. Both share the same clock and the same habits, so learning any one teaches you most of the rest.

The ten, in one line each

The shared shell

Every app opens on the same permission gate, then shows the same two bars across the top: devices above, transport below. Beneath that, a large canvas and a control column on the right — except Sequencer Lab, which uses the full width for its step grids.

Getting connected

Transport and clock

Automata — life sequencer

A square grid running Conway's Game of Life. A playhead sweeps left to right, one column per step, and plays whatever is alive in that column: the row sets the pitch, the number of living neighbours sets velocity and gate length. Every so many steps the grid takes a generation, so the pattern rewrites itself while it plays.

First pattern in six steps

1. Choose an Out port and set Root and Scale to something your receiving instrument will thank you for.
2. Draw on the grid — press and drag paints, and starting on a living cell erases instead.
3. Press Play. The playhead sweeps; the column readout follows it.
4. Set Evolve. At never the grid is a fixed sixteen-step pattern; at every 4 it is barely repeatable. Every 16 — one generation a bar — is the useful middle.
5. Set Max voices to taste. A dense column can have a dozen living cells; only the most crowded few are played.
6. Give each voice band its own MIDI channel to split registers across several instruments.

Figure 3 — Automata itself, running Conway Life (B3/S23) on a 16×16 grid at 1/16 with Evolve set to every 16. Four voice bands on four channels, colour-coded by register

Transport extras

Rules, edges and seed buttons

Generation, population, column, status

Figure 4 — Automata’s Rules block, with the edge behaviour and the three seed buttons, and the State block beside it — generation, population, current column and status. Watch the population for when the grid has gone extinct or static — the reading that decides whether Revive is doing any work

Rules

Musical

Physarum — slime network

Thousands of agents each lay down a chemical trail and then steer towards the strongest trail they can smell. Out of that alone, the colony carves a network of filaments that constantly rebuilds itself. Nothing in the simulation knows about music: the sound comes from probes — rings placed on the field that measure trail density underneath them, fire a note when a branch grows into them, and send that density as a controller.

First sound in five steps

1. Pick an Out port and press Play. Nothing may fire yet — the colony needs a few seconds to build structure.
2. Choose a Preset. Network and Veins build clean filaments; Swarm and Churn stay agitated; Mist barely holds a shape.
3. Drag on empty canvas. The colony bends towards your pointer — this is the main way to play it.
4. Raise or lower Threshold until probes fire at a rate you like, and set Trigger to suit: Growth only for sparse events, Sustained for a pulse while covered.
5. Drag individual probes onto branches you want to hear, and turn CC on to send density as continuous control.

Figure 6 — Physarum on the Network preset — 9000 agents, eight probes at 1/8, Sustained trigger. The bright filaments are what the probes are listening for

The nine colony controls

The eight presets

Figure 7 — Physarum’s Colony block at readable size: the nine controls that shape how the network grows, from agent count down to wander

Colony

Nine parameters govern the simulation. They interact strongly — change one at a time, and use the presets as landmarks to return to.

Probes

Vector Path — drawn arpeggiator

Four layers, each holding one drawn path. A particle laps its path in step with the clock and plays whatever it passes over: height sets pitch, quantised to the layer's scale; horizontal position drives the controller; and the curvature of the line at that point sets velocity, so tight corners hit harder than long sweeps.

First line in five steps

1. Pick an Out port. The label at the top left of the canvas always says which layer a drag will draw into.
2. Drag a shape. A loop gives a repeating figure; a line gives a shape that reads forwards then backwards.
3. Press Play. The particle appears and the note name flashes beside it as each note fires.
4. Set Lap — how many steps one circuit takes — and Div, the step rate. Together they set how fast the shape is read.
5. Press 2 and draw a second layer on a different channel, with a different Lap. Two paths at 16 and 12 steps drift against each other indefinitely.

Figure 9 — Vector Path with one open figure drawn on layer 1: 1/16 division, sixteen-step lap, C2 minor over a two-octave span

Drawing

Per layer

Sequencer Lab — clock engine

The conventional instrument of the set, and the one to reach for when you know what you want to hear: eight drum tracks and one bass line, sixteen steps each, edited through a mode switch rather than a menu. It is also the reference implementation of the clock the other five use — the jitter readout is here because this is the app you slave to a drum machine to find out whether its clock is any good.

Figure 11 — Sequencer Lab in Trigger mode — the first half of the grid. White steps are accented, the violet column is the playhead, and every track carries its own note, channel and length

Drums

Figure 12 — The first eight steps of the bass line in Pitch mode — click the upper half of a step to raise it a scale degree, the lower half to lower it. The orange underline marks a slide

Bass line

Timing readouts

Quadrivium — polyrhythm engine

Six rhythm tracks, drawn as concentric rings, each generated by a different algorithm. There are no steps to draw: you choose an engine, turn its two parameters, and steer the pattern that comes out. Because each track has its own length, the combined cycle is usually far longer than a bar — the centre of the display tells you how long.

Figure 14 — Quadrivium with six rings: Kick and Snare on Euclid, Hat on eleven pulses in sixteen, and the combined tempo at the centre

One track: engine, length, rotation

Three tracks, all on Euclid

Figure 15 — A Quadrivium track close up, and the first three tracks below it: the engine menu with its length and rotation, the pulse count and its reseed button, then note, channel, probability and ratchet

The six engines

Each engine exposes two numbers, labelled for what they mean there, plus rotation and length which work the same everywhere.

Per track

Global

Harmonograph — ratio engine

Four pendulums, two swinging horizontally and two vertically, drawing a figure together. Each pendulum's frequency ratio does two jobs at once: it sets how often that pendulum fires a note, and it is the interval that note plays. A pendulum at three to two triggers three times for every two of the base and sounds a perfect fifth. Rhythm and harmony are the same number — that is the whole idea.

Figure 17 — Harmonograph with Just tuning on: P1 at unison on C3, P2 a 3:2 fifth on G3 at +2 cents, the figure repeating every thirty base cycles

Per pendulum

P1 and P2, with cents deviation

Decay, auto-strike and trail

Figure 18 — Two pendulums as the app shows them — ratio, axis, channel, amplitude and phase, with the cents deviation from equal temperament printed on the right: 3:2 sits at +2

Tuning

Motion

The second shell

Kinetic, Ricochet, Flux and Fossil are built on a later, tighter frame. There is no permission overlay and no Rescan: ports are requested on load and the menus refresh themselves when hardware appears. The clock is the same 24 ppqn scheduler with the same look-ahead. What changes is the furniture.

Kinetic — trigger machine

Three mechanical engines, one at a time, each producing a list of triggers for a cycle of one to sixteen bars. The whole cycle is computed in advance and scheduled against the clock, so the animation can drop frames without the timing moving. Six tracks receive the events; what an event means depends on the engine.

Figure 20 — Clockwork: four gears at 12, 8, 18 and 5 teeth against a twelve-tooth driver — 90 events over a sixteen-beat cycle

Figure 21 — Loom on a Rosepath draft. The drawdown on the left is the actual woven cloth; every raised shaft fires its track

Figure 22 — Bounce: three balls at restitution 0.68, each with its own span in beats. 191 events in the same sixteen beats

Figure 19b — Kinetic’s Engine block: the three engines, the Apply edits quantiser set to next bar, and the cycle length with its pulse count

Ricochet — breakout sequencer

A ball works its way through a rack of bricks, and every collision is a MIDI event. Bricks play pitched notes chosen by where they sit; walls, ceiling and paddle drive a percussion kit. The simulation runs in beat time — speed is measured in field units per beat — so it follows the clock and can be slaved like anything else, and there are no random numbers anywhere: the same rack and the same settings play the same run every time.

The rack

Ball and paddle

Pitch map and percussion

Flux — modulation generator

The one app here that does not play notes. Four continuous systems — two chaotic attractors, a gravitational simulation and a ripple tank — each exposing several dimensions, mapped onto eight controller lanes. Use it alongside a sequencer, not instead of one: slave it to the same clock and let it move against the part rather than inside it.

Figure 25 — Flux on Lorenz. Eight lanes read the six dimensions of one trajectory; the readout at the top left reports engine, dimension count and message rate

Figure 26 — The ripple tank: three drifting sources, eight numbered probes sampling the interference field

Engines

Four lanes on N-Body dimensions

What one lane can read

Figure 27 — Four N-Body lanes as the app shows them: each picks a dimension — b1 speed, b1 angle, b2 radius, b2 speed — with its controller number, channel, resolution, rate ceiling, invert and trigger switches, then depth, offset and slew

Lanes

Fossil — frozen event player

Physical models of events that happen once — an earthquake, a tide, a geyser cycle, a pulsar's spin — computed as a fixed list of impulses, stretched onto a number of bars, and looped. Nothing evolves while it plays: this is a score, and the work is in choosing which part of the event to loop and which impulses to keep.

Figure 29 — Fossil playing five millisecond pulsars. Sixty seconds of real time compressed 3.1× into four bars — 623 triggers

Figure 30 — The geyser source: 2.4 days of eruptions compressed over ten thousand times, with the window covering 38.7 hours of it

Seismic, and its six phase tracks

Tidal, geyser and pulsar

Figure 31 — The four modelled sources, with every constant exposed: Omori’s p and c for the aftershocks, the six tidal constituents by name and period, the geyser’s two waits and its coupling, and five real pulsars with their periods in milliseconds

Sources

Window, quantise, threshold

Reading your own CSV

Figure 32 — Fossil’s Time scale block, where nearly all the musical choice happens, and the CSV reader beside it

Time scale

Running several at once

All ten speak the same clock, so they combine without ceremony. The rule is simple: exactly one clock master, everything else on external.

When something goes wrong

Keys and figures

Shared

Per app

Figures worth remembering