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TrackPerformer

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:05:15 +0000

TrackPerformer provides a visual stage for your music, using HTML5 canvas and audio. On that stage, performers “play” the instruments in the music visually. In other words, it’s a visualisation system for music, but based on the notation (the abstract) rather than the audio (the manifestation).

Essentially, you take a piece of music, convert it into a format that TrackPerformer understands (JSON), describe how you want it to be performed, and then watch! You can, of course, write your own performers.

Before going any further, let’s see it in action. The music is “Colony”, a new piece that I wrote about a week ago.

Note: You won’t be able to view the performance linked above in Internet Explorer, due to its over-aggressive script-blocking: the scripts served from GitHub have the wrong mime-type, so IE won’t let them run.

Take a look at the project on GitHub to see how it all fits together. TrackPerformer itself resides in the “Source” directory; in “Examples”, you’ll find the performance of Colony; in “Utilities”, there’s a JavaScript macro for Komodo IDE/Edit that will help you to translate copied-and-pasted OpenMPT pattern data into TrackPerformer’s JSON format.

You can find more information on the TrackPerformer wiki, including an outline of the format, and some basic instructions for getting started. I’ll be adding more information to the wiki over the next few days, and I’ll post updates here too.

Let me know what you think!

Conflagration

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:28:40 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write a piece in this idiom for years. It’s an industrial/orchestral hybrid. I don’t know why, but I always find this style of music fun, notwithstanding its occasional heaviness.

More of the usual Native Instruments suspects at play in this piece: Kontakt, Massive, FM8, and Battery. All of them driven by OpenMPT and Xlutop Chainer.

(Download)

Conflagration by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Juggernaut

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:01:44 +0000

A piece in the same vein as Fluorescent. My wife describes this piece as “dystopian”. I, of course, had to reply with this rather witty riposte: “Dystopia? I ’ardly even know ’er!”.

This piece is somewhat heavier than some of my other recent endeavours, but hopefully not too much so. In terms of VSTis, it makes use of the usual culprits: Reaktor, Massive, FM8, and Kontakt.

(Download)

Juggernaut by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Fluorescent

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:38:39 +0000

So I’ve been playing a bit of Unreal Tournament 3 of late, and UT3 happens to have a pretty awesome demoscene-inspired soundtrack. I guess it was inevitable that I should would go down that path as well! This piece is the result. It gave me the chance to dust off some of my less-often-used VSTis; Reaktor, Absynth and Battery all get a look-in on this track.

(Download)

Fluorescent by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Frequency

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Fri, 27 May 2011 09:52:32 +0000

This track is, in many ways, a harkening back to my earlier compositions. Its structure is more straightforward, its arrangement is more natural and less synthetic, and it came about from a session in front of the piano. These elements form the basis of much of my earlier work, and, if I’m honest, they probably define my preferred method of composition.

Let me know what you think!

(Download)

Frequency by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Cascade

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:37:27 +0000

This track is actually from a couple of weeks ago. I just never got round to putting it up here. It’s really a background track: something you listen to while you do something else. Part of the idea behind it was to make a melange of disparate “instruments”, and smoosh them together to make something that’s coherent. Let me know what you think!

(Download)

Cascade by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Piece-a-week: The subtle monkey

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 23:52:28 +0000

This year, I’ve decided to try something new with my music. I’m going to endeavour to produce something each week, and put it up here for public consumption. The idea is that it’ll force me to write more music. Bear in mind that I can’t guarantee that what I put up will be any good!

So, to kick it all off, here’s a track I wrote in not very much time, entitled “The subtle monkey”. (Track nomenclature has never been one of my strong points.) Let me know what you think!

(Download)

The Subtle Monkey by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Emmanuel: God with us

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 03:16:24 +0000

My wife and I have just finished our Christmas carols album, “Emmanuel: God with us”. On it, you’ll find brand new orchestral arrangements of ten great carols.

It’s available for digital download now at . You can listen to each of the tracks in full above, and decide whether or not you want to help support poor starving musicians like ourselves.

Each track is going for around $1 (or more, if you’re so inclined!), and you can pick up the whole album for $5 or more. You can also get your hands on a physical CD if you like — just let me know!

Generative Music

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:08:11 +0000

Continuing my HTML5 and canvas experiments, I’ve put together a generative music system. Essentially, a series of particles move across a field, occasionally triggering sounds — the sound triggered depends on their location in the field.

There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. Under the hood, I’ve got a series of HTML5 Audio objects that are used to provide polyphonic audio using a simple round-robin algorithm (I encoded the audio in OGG, so you’ll need to use an OGG-friendly browser, like Firefox). The particles are much simpler than those in my previous canvas dalliance, in that they don’t swarm, and their motion is more linear.

View (and hear!) it live

[Music] Lament

Barry van Oudtshoorn — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:12:03 +0000

About a month ago, I was playing around on the piano, and I came up with a fragment of melody that I couldn’t get out of my head. I played with it, twisting it around, pushing it in different directions, seeing what I could do with it. Ultimately, I turned it into a full piece of music, and this is the result.

Like this track? Buy it at thesixtyone, and help feed an impoverished (well, not really) programmer.

You can also listen to one of the (early) improvisations I played on this theme by downloading the recording I made on my phone here.