Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers
perfectcircuit.com
perfectcircuit.com
For example, in this article, he discusses algorithms as "Algorithms as Scores" (https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/268697/Mag...).
These concepts have profoundly influenced my creation of Glicol (https://glicol.org/).
As I say, it's otherwise perfect for me, it's sound design capabilities are really fantastic
However, their syntax differs greatly. Glicol's syntax is designed for live coding, prioritizing simplicity and readability and it's actually partially inspired by modular synth(for example: https://glicol.org/demo#minitechno and https://glicol.org/tour#fm), while SC's syntax inherits from Smalltalk, adhering to standard OOP. SC's ecosystem is mature, offering GUI development, various sound processing methods, and robust multi-channel support. In contrast, Glicol's sound processing is still very minimal and experimental. Once the basic architecture, like multi-channel and audio graph handling, is established, adding sound processing modules will be linear.
Additionally, Glicol's support for both browser and CLI is a highlight.
https://reaktorplayer.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
Roland’s popularity and success speaks for itself so there’s no need to prove anything. Their UIs are just completely at odds with my personal creative flow.
Back in the late 90s I mixed an entire album on a VS-880 (with good results, it sold a couple thousand copies and got decent college radio airplay) so I’ve definitely given them a chance and gotten the full experience — but that damn thing fought me relentlessly. None of the motions I learned stuck with me.
I feel the same way about a lot of hardware electronic gear (I was utterly defeated by an Akai sampler around the same time). The exceptions are the interfaces that hew to a consistent theoretical model and emphasize tweaking of individual parameters rather than selection of presets. I was highly productive within the Logic Audio environment; I had good impressions of the Nord Modular and its GUI software.
Any Roland-style modeling of modular synthesis is likely to leave me behind. Glad it works for you and many others, though!
The book is from Roland’s 100M modular system and written in the late 1970’s or early 80’s. That version of the System 100 was menuless, entirely analog, and patched with some basic normals and wires. I came across the book because my Eurorack is mostly Behringer System 100 modules because they are cheap as am I.
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I picked up a VS880 for about $100 last year and use it as my primary multitrack recorder because I prefer not to use general purpose computers for creative work anymore and it’s a hobby. I have a ZuluSCSI plugged into the back and record to an SD card on that.
This year, I made a commitment to learn how to use it…not much point in selling it…and do more recording. What I like about it is not the menus. It’s that being the first in the series, the design brief seems to have been a better tape machine and alternative to ADAT. Later models were competing with DAWs.
Because the VS880 is fanless, I can leave it on all day while I do other things (e.g. take a nap). Of course it works for me because my musical ambitions are very unambitious.
Aside from using a similar visual design language it's hard to believe it's the same company that makes Roland's contemporary menu divers.
And the Behringer modules are dirt cheap. I think a few of the utilities are like $50 new.
Anyway, most Behringer modules can be had used for $50 or less with some patience. They are not investments in anything other than happiness.
After the D50 - and especially after the DX7, which started the one-slider-panel 80s trend - synth interfaces started to sprout two-line LCD panels.
Most Roland UIs today are pretty horrific.
This also describes the Akai MPC world.
I suspect it describes any system that has accumulated sufficient lineage to always be in tension between new features, existing technology, standard practice and legacy user expectations.
Synthesizer manufacturers are expert at repackaging modules, hardware and software - their business model can't handle the costs of blank slate development for each new product... Baffling UX often results.
A few years I figure to get started. That’s unreasonable for a fart app and entirely reasonable for a musical instrument. Pianos and cellos require time to learn and so do MPC’s.
The MPC UX is clearly designed for musicians committed to the instrument. Sure you can play on-pitch notes more easily than with a violin, but you will need just as much practice to get to Carnegie Hall.
At its core, the MPC is a B2B product. The UX is designed with a full understanding it is not for everyone. No musical instrument is.
As an aside, I realize I can think about my MC-303 and MC-505 in terms of a scene based workflow.
Music's very fluid. Recordings of performances are probably as close to 'same' as we can get. Non-musicians may prefer to listen to these 'same' performances over and over for the 'fidelity' of their experiences. But it might stop them (as they age) from discovering better ones.
If MIDI is used to create the dynamics, 'patches' and all other modulations, oscillations, tempos, et.al of a synth or ten, then something close to 'same' might be approachable. But that means, oh, say, ten times as much work.
Depends on the listener whether that's a good thing. In my experience, a superior cover of a single recording (same or different singer, different producer) can turn a OK single into a damn! single.
Edit: (Case in point: 'Major Tom (Coming Home)' 1983 version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO0A0XcWy88 )
When designing a notation, you're choosing what parts of a work you consider to be essential (notated) and non-essential (non-notated). That is itself an artistic choice. Everything you choose to not represent in the notation is something that you are letting future performers or cover artists choose for themselves.
The notation serves as sort of a negotiated dividing line between what the original artist wants to claim for themselves and consider a required part of "the work" versus what future artists are allowed to participate in.
Given that modular music is rarely played by anyone except the original author, I suspect that standardized notation isn't very important. All that really matters is each author having their own private shorthand so they can recreate what they care to recreate.
Today, bands (esp. jam bands like the Dead) might agree to back up anyone who decides to go 'off-plan'. (These days, we can even take big samples of someone else's tracks (if they agree) and do 'covers' that are an entire re-working of their originals.)
The big difference is that you can save and load patches in a node editor, but you have to rebuild everything by hand on a modular. Even then you're never going to reproduce panel settings exactly.
Some people find this appealing, but for me it's the main reason I stopped using my big modular and changed to Cherry/Softtube/VCV Rack.
It's also true that if you're synth-literate you should be able to recreate many patches by ear. There isn't usually that much going on, so it looks a lot more complex on paper than it really is. Things get more complex if you're using modules that play samples or do something exceptionally unique, but even then you can usually get in the ballpark - if not exactly, then close enough for something that works aesthetically.
The musical part is a different problem. You can scribble graphic scores, but they're far too crude to represent anything beyond the vaguest hint of what's going on.
People also need to let go of the idea that written music is about conveying how to create an exact reproduction of the original sound. That's what a recording is for. A musical score conveys the scheme under which to produce sound, and notates the important characteristics of the sound to produce. Everything else is intentionally left up to the performer.
If you don't believe that is valuable, you don't need to use it as a tool. However, it allows future musicians to both understand what you were thinking and put their own spin on your work.
It's essentially a small DSL that can produce graphviz charts of patches. There have been other attempts to do this kind of thing, but they rely on the writer to describe their modules, which makes it quite tedious. I wanted to have a 'library' format that would allow people to specific module interfaces once, and then they could be imported.
I got a basic prototype working in Perl if anyone is interested, but never got around to really polishing it up and writing a bunch of 'libraries' for different modules.
https://git.spwbk.site/swatson/modmark
Interested if anyone knows of / has written something better.
I’ve been playing with modular synths for over 25 years. One of my favorite parts is the ephemeral nature of patching. A bump of a knob or the nature of unsynced elements can quickly make actual recall of a larger patch impossible. Due to heat or other variability I’ve had patches change on me over 45 minutes of no one touching them. In a world of digital recall and perfection; this really speaks to me. Immediacy can be relished. It is now or never
just pretend PCM is notation and that’s that. problem solved
the new problem introduced, however, is that now a “musician” (interpreter) is just a wav player
and a musician creator (singer songwriter, or composer, or producer of some sort) must choose zero or one way too many times in order to “write” one track.
The Source diagrams resemble the Figure 4 example by Allen Strange in TFA.
[1]. https://paia.com/
[2]. https://www.matrixsynth.com/2012/02/1981-paia-4700-modular.h...
Of course, you couldn't "read" the card and guess what it souned like; the patchcard didn't record the settings of the knobs either.
It feels like the current system is the Imperial system and somewhere ought to be the SI metric system.
Any reason for that beyond “feeling?” And are you very deeply familiar with how the current system resolves differences between the single chromatic and 12 diatonic scales?
Full disclosure here: I’m a pianist who can generally sight read nearly anything (that’s well-edited) put in front of me, to the point of having music directed opera and theater for a living for a while, rather than using my CS and math degrees immediately after earning them from UNC.
I’ve also created an app, BeatScratch (https://beatscratch.io) that, among other things, attempts to resolve some of the challenges of editing (which I’d argue, again, really involves understanding how musical notation maps chromatic and diatonic scales between each other - ie “picking the best sequence of flats and sharps automatically to maximize readability”).
To me, a lot of these “musical notation is outdated” arguments seem the same as “there will soon be no need for programmers; AI can write all our code,” or those arguments insisting some “visual programming” paradigm should replace languages like Rust and Python.
That is to say… they’re arguments made by people who don’t really understand why the existing systems work the way they do and have done so successfully for decades (or centuries).
For that matter, it’s not like there aren’t centuries of alternative notation systems, whether it’s tablature, figured bass, or neume notation.
I can't imagine it would be that hard to notate such things for electronic music. Good old text sitting next to your good old staff works wonders.
The bigger issue for electronic music, IMO, is the notation of sounds that don't fit on a staff well. Modern classical composers (who use sheet music extensively in the creative process) have various notations for these sorts of things.
Yes I know why it is the way it is. But if you read your comment and your credentials you'll get the gist of what I'm thinking.
In turn, the notation that we use has become more flexible than ever. There are rich notations for microtonal music, various playing techniques, clusters of notes, and many more things. If you took a score by a modern composer (see Saad Haddad's pieces on YouTube) and showed it to JS Bach, it would be unrecognizable to him. Music notation is a living language just like English is.
By the way, I have been an on-and-off professional in the music world, although it is a "side gig" to programming, including some composing, tuning, and playing.
However, it is undeniable that music notation is a system made for power users. It's not an easy language to learn. The ideas of "information dense" and "expressive" should remind you of the ideas behind the A programming language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
"Notation must die" by Tantacrul
Cardinal runs natively, as a plugin in various formats, and in your browser. It is based on VCV Rack 2, but has a fixed (large) selection of libre-licensed modules.
"Exception thrown: Uncaught RangeError: Array buffer allocation failed" on Android Chrome.
More amazing is that anyone thinks we know that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240714160259/https://www.perfe...
It's a curated collection of experimental music scores; part art magazine, part avant garde musical journal, and thoroughly delightful :)
Innovations and discoveries here (including my own) seem largely pointless. It's a classic example of "you spent so much wondering if you could, you never stopped to think if you should".
The authors final section Does Notation Even Matter hits on the larger points I would make - ephemerality of voltage (tuning), difference in modular systems, etc., however it fails to make a strong case for the need to notate this kind of music apart from form(?).
It is disappointing to see these kind of regressive pursuits still enjoying any kind of popularity in avant garde music circles - they are experimenting with new and novel instruments, why would paper, out of all modern mediums available to the artist, be the best suited for notating this kind of music?