thought I'd chime in (Score 1)

Hello all.

As the article got a variety of responses, I thought it might be just as good I chime in and clear up a few points.

I do admit the connection to Beethoven is rather weak, as you probably understand this was not my words, but the write's, anyway I thought his way of writing it conveyed the general meaning, if not totally correct in every sense.

Now to another apology: The web link. Yes, this site is hopelessly out of date. I guess the link have been messed up, as this points to my old site. A newer site (but this one also several months old) can be found at http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/
This page documents the research project covered by the article. There are also quite a lot of audio examples of fairly recent works (last year) at http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/ArtisticDocBrandtsegg.htm (everything after/including Motorpsycho was made with the new version of ImproSculpt4),

It sounds like the comments on the audio clips have been responses to music found on the old site, and yes, this is from 2002 (or thereabouts) and earlier, made with the previous version of ImproSculpt.

Some of you might find it interesting to have a look at the software,
the current version of Improsculpt can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/improsculpt/
and some other applications can be found at
http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/applications/partikkelapplications.htm
ImproSculpt is open source, feel free to change it in any way you wish, I'd be happy to help those so inclined to get started. The code on sourceforge also contains extensive user documentation, as well as (of course) documentation of the code.

As some of you correctly stated, I do rely on granular synthesis for substantial parts of the audio processing in ImproSculpt. And granular synthesis is admittedly nothing new.
But there is indeed something new about the kind of granular synthesis used here. Inspired by curtis Roads' excellent book "Microsound" I set out to design a monster granular synthesizer, capable of performing all types of time domain granular synthesis described by mr Roads. The point of doing it all in one single audio generator is to be able to morph seamlessly between different types of granular synthesis. While working on this design, I also came up with a few variants of granular techniques not covered in Microsound. Most notably, the new granular synthesizer is capable of "per grain" control over output routing, effects sends (you can send, say, every 5th grain to a reverb), mixing of several souce waveforms into each grain, doing frequency modulation inside grains, synchronizing the grain generator clock to an external clock source (or other instances of the same granular synthesizer. And so on. due to the extensive possibilities of this granular synthesizer, I decided to name it "partikkel", which is Norwegian for "particle". Even Curtis Roads have used "particle synthesis" as an alternate term to describe granular synthesis. The "partikkel" generator was designed by me, and implemented as an opcode for Csound by Thom Johansen and Torgeir Strand Henriksen. Anyone can get Csound for free (open source) and start working with "partikkel" to see what it can do. Admittedly, it is a monster, and not exactly user friendly. This is the reason why I created the partikkel applications (link above) to encourage other users to start experimenting with partikkel. all of the applications represent subsets of the partikkel features, taking something away to make something else easier to understand.

Now, ImproSculpt is not all about particle synthesis, there are other composition techniques involved as well. some of these work on melodies and harmonies in a somewhat more traditional sense. These algorithms analyze midi input notes, creating variations on the recorded input, or harmony voices. This can be viewed as a completely separate tool from the partikkel based modules, but the reason why I build it into the same single instrument is that I wanted to experiment with different approaches to algorithmic improvisation, trying to find out of there's a way to connect the different viewpoints.

The way I see it, composition algorithms can help getting some automation going, letting the computer take some of the many decisions needed, but the human performer has an essential role in providing a sense of direction and musicality. The reason for allowing computer automation is to enable more decisions to be made simultaneously, enabling a shorter reaction time from musical idea to audio output.

Oeyvind Brandtsegg