PlantsSystem-FiveGenerativeVideo

video upload by plantssystem

"Here is a digest video of five generative sound pieces I made for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (RP2350). Each one is a self-contained instrument: switch it on and it plays by itself, with a small screen showing what is happening and a joystick and four buttons to steer it on most pieces.

Hardware: Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (RP2350) with a Waveshare Pico-Audio board for stereo audio out and a Waveshare Pico-LCD-1.3 (240x240 display, joystick, A/B/X/Y buttons). All sound is generated on the Pico 2 itself; there are no external synths or samplers. The firmware is written in Arduino (arduino-pico core).

The pieces in the video:

AMBIENTWS: Switch it on and just listen. An endless ambient piece that breathes in Japanese scales (hirajoshi, miyako-bushi, Ryukyu) and Maj7 progressions, layering a granular voice, a physical-model voice and a pulse/rhythm voice, and pausing now and then to catch its breath. It can follow USB MIDI clock.

AZIMUTH: Clicks, sine pings and noise bursts tick like a glitching heartbeat, with a kick, bass and arpeggios racing across the stereo field. Patterns repeat bar by bar and renew every four bars, or can be frozen in place.

GIBSON: A recorded voice keeps talking until it shatters, stutters, reverses and bit-crushes for a few seconds, then calmly picks up where it left off.

LAWRENCE: In an empty room a grand piano quietly composes. Each melody is heard once, and a new piece is born at every start.

PROPHETIQUE: A 5-voice polyphonic generative sequencer built from a single Prophet-5 note. Four tracks play the phrases of an original song, and as you change how many notes are dropped, the playback direction and how pitches are chosen, the song unravels, rearranges itself and drifts away from the original.

The source code is not public. The pieces are shared only as firmware with a few artists for their own work and live use.

Credits:
GIBSON voice: from "William Gibson on Technology" by Jeff Lacy ( • William Gibson on technology ), used under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.... The audio was cut into phrases and is glitched in real time.
LAWRENCE piano: Salamander Grand Piano V3 by Alexander Holm, CC BY 3.0. Samples were converted to 8-bit and a subset of pitches is used."