Loom

Overview

Loom is a modular, Ruby-based generative music platform for Ableton Live.

While it has been used for performances and installations since late 2010, it is still in an early alpha stage of development. Caveat emptor!

http://adamflorin.com/loom

Core Concepts

A player generates and plays back gestures (sequences of MIDI events) for the track it belongs to.

Each player is made up of modules which extend its core functionality—from the low-level morphologies of generated gestures, to how those gestures are sequenced in real time, to high-level player behaviors and reactions to external conditions.

Each module has inputs in the form of random number generators controlled by user input.

All players belong to a shared environment, which can govern overall musical form (not yet implemented!).

Technology Stack

Loom is built on...

...Live because of its robust timing, MIDI controller integration, and full-featured music production environment.
...Ruby because of its ease of prototyping, intrinsic modularity, and mutability ("monkeypatchability"?).

Loom bridges these two technologies across a rather tall stack, leveraging the interface-building (and parameter storage) capabilities of Max For Live, the native MIDI & message-handling of Max, and the performance and stability of Java & JRuby along the way.

Usage

See the screencast.

Installing

Please see INSTALLATION.

Creating and editing players

To create a player in Live:

create a MIDI track and give it any old instrument
Before the instrument, insert a MIDI Effect Rack.
Navigate to the loom/m4l directory in the Live file browser
Drag any player module into the rack.
Hit play. You're already generating music!

As you add more player modules to the rack, they will each add their own dimension of depth to the generated output. Note: you can only add each module once!

So long as they're all in the same rack, they'll be treated as a single player. (You can actually put multiple racks on a same track to have multiple players--as in the left and right hands of a piano, for example.)

Setting up the environment

Note: the environment is not currently necessary unless you are modifying Ruby source and need to globally reload the system. The environment will contain more powerful features in future versions.

Drop the environment m4l device in the Master track. (It doesn't generate any MIDI or affect the audio. This is just a good global place to put it.)

To reload all modules across all players, hit MASTER RELOAD in the environment. It's recommended you map this to a key in Live (which unfortunately must be tapped 2x).

Modules

Chromatic: select a pitch set from the equal tempered MIDI scale, with range and position settings.
Pattern: define a MIDI pattern as a series of pulses, with accent position and time scale.
Loop: loop the last few gestures.
Syncopation: vary note lengths based on Pattern's accent position.
Density: probability of silence (rests) vs gestures.

thinium/loom