omsonic & dBs Music - Stochastic Inspiration Generator - COMING SOON !

Published on Jul 28, 2019 omsonic

"COMING SOON ! The Stochastic Inspiration Generator ! Its a unique module that responds to your probabilistic musical direction but you don’t play ‘on’ it, you duet with it by starting with the fundamental musical atoms and controlling how likely different pitch, duration, octave and transition events will be using its controls."

via Omsonic:

"What Is It ?

not a traditional sequencer – it doesn’t repeat itself (unless you tell it to!)
not a probability sequencer – you don’t program fixed steps for variation
not a random source – you can control what it will do (within limits)
not a chaotic source – identical initial conditions don’t produce identical output

Stochastic is an Inspiration Generator ! Its a unique sequencer module that responds to your probabilistic musical direction but you don’t play ‘on’ it, you duet with it by starting with the fundamental musical atoms and controlling how likely different pitch, duration, octave and transition events will be using its controls.

Overview

Each event Stochastic generates has its pitch, octave, duration, onset, offset, portamento and ratchet set by probability controls. You can exert as much or as little control over what the next event will be as you wish. This could be very simple (e.g. raise C, E, G and 1/16 to 100% and you have a random arpeggiator kicking out constant 1/16 ) or something much more interesting…

Stochastic leverages tonal harmony by exploiting its statistical hierarchy of pitches: some notes turn up a lot, some not so much, some not at all. Being ‘in’ C Major means having lots of Cs, quite a lot of Gs and Es, a few Fs, some Ds, As and Bs, but no C#s, D#s, F#s, G#s, A#s. Set the note probabilities accordingly and Stochastic will spontaneously jam in C Major. Shift the probabilities, and you morph the tonality, key or mode they define into new tonal landscapes.

Stochastic knows all the musical parameters that shape a line: you can probablise the overall octave range over which it improvises (‘register’) and the octave offsets of each note. Bass notes define harmony and inversion, so you can imply a change of C Root to C 1st Inversion by initially dropping only the Cs by 2 octaves and then swapping to drop only the Es, all in live performance. You can even set the likelihood that melodies will be stepwise or more angular.

Stochastic also knows about rhythm: you can set the likelihood that each subsequent note will be any value from an 8 bar drone to constant 1/16 pulses. And Stochastic can loop: if it suddenly strikes melody gold, hit Loop, define your loop length, release, and it will loop the phrase until you suspend loop. Hit Loop again to return to the saved loop, or hold to overwrite a new one.

Features

Probability amount control over: Pitch, Octave and Duration and more…
Looping of upto 18 steps
Multiple secondary functions (Details to be announced)
High accuracy and resolution (16 Bit DAC) 1 volt per octave CV output
Trigger output for pinging LPGs and other modules
12 High quality LED note sliders
Built in the UK with quality parts
MORE FEATURES TO BE ANNOUNCED !!!
Physical info
60 mA +12V
7 mA -12V
0 mA 5V
25 mm Depth
18 HP

History

Way back in 2009, before omsonic was born, our research collaborator Phineas Head sketched a concept for a stochastic sequencer, using a novel noise source / variable width window comparator circuit. This turned 40 years of sequencing convention on its head, challenging the idea that sequencers could only either repeat a row of notes, or randomise their order. Instead of fixing steps and randomising progression, it fixed pitch and probabilized progression.

There were sketch schematics and software models in Nord Modular but this was before the Eurorack boom and economically viable options for small-scale PCB fabrication…so it got shelved. By 2014, the Raspberry Pi allowed a stand alone MIDI version (on Python, with a Doepfer Drehbank for live probability control) and was limited only by the expense of MIDI controllers with enough controller knobs.

In the subsequent Eurorack boom probability grew as an approach in sequencing, but while several models implemented probabilistic control over whether a (fixed) step would occur (VariGate, Metron) or if a pitch would vary (Eloquencer), the step still remained the fixed unit, and the event as the variable one.

So, a decade after its initial conception, omsonic and Phin Head, in collaboration with dBs Music, have implemented Stochastic as a self contained Eurorack module."