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ScriptSonic for generative ambient

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ScriptSonic is an interesting application for iOS, which did not get the attention it deserved. Perhaps because when it launched it had a very high price (24.99$) but since april 2017 the price is much more reasonable (9.99$). Basically, it allows to use a flavour of JavaScript to generate midi events which can be received by other midi-enabled applications in the iPad. It can also play samples and perform some simple processing on them, but in my opinion it is the midi side what makes it much more interesting. The user interface is not familiar, and a bit difficult to use. The first thing you see is the "Projects" screen, from which you can load one of the 17 examples which come with it (and later, your own creations), each one visible as a thumbnail: Selecting one and clicking "Import", or double tapping in one thumbnail, you arrive to the "Loop" screen, which is where the performance of the music happens. It looks like a tracker, and indee
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Hello SonicPi!

I recently discovered SonicPi , and it is awesome! It is a programming framework in which you write Ruby code to control the Supercollider engine and produce music. It is aimed to “live” performance (live coding), but it can be also used to experiment with algorithmically generated music. My first idea was that it should be not very difficult to “port” my piece “ Bay “ from ngen to SonicPi, and it was very straightforward, indeed. The same code can produce the two variations “Bay” and “Bay at night” simply uncommenting one line. If you don’t have SonicPi installed but want to know what does this sound like, here is a little excerpt. Here is the code: # Bay (2005) re-implemented in SonicPi (2016) # The original Bay was created with ngen an rendered with Csound. # The original ngen implementation is here # https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2374752/csound/bay.gen # and the csound rendition can be listened at # https://archive.org/details/jld_bay # The following
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Prologue.

It has been some time since I'm interested in generating Ambient music using computers, mainly iPad and PC, trying different tools for algorithmic composition or improvising with software synthethizers. One of the first thing I published was a piece titled "Bay", algorithmically generated using ngen and rendered in a PC using csound . The result was uploaded ten years ago to the Internet Archive , and it is still there . When the iPad arrived, a plethora of new tools and synths were at my disposition. I published some of my experiments at SoundCloud and YouTube , but I realized that all these works were disperse, and that a blog would be a good way to tie them up, at the same time that will provide me a more personal space to write about the tools and process around each piece. So, here it is!  I wrote most of this for myself, but if anyone else is reading it, you are welcome. Drop a comment if you like it.
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