Hello everyone I've been making a new tool called arroost. It's for making scrappy music. Please do make something in it and send it to me. arroost.com I will post some examples of its use in the replies

I love this, it's a very interesting way to represent a sequencer, and you can create pattern that are as complex as the kinds you'd do with a DAW, but they don't suffer from the awkward "grid-ness" of traditional sequencers.

nothing happened when I tried it: I got pluses and circles and wires between them. but I don't know what I have to do .. couldn't get any sounds

funky!

how do you make a circle go red, then?

before I try arroost, here are my first impressions of Olive Amphibian.mp4: 1. I hear lots of (boring, robotic) repetition - yawn 2. I hear your voice add some vibrato, which makes the vocal part more interesting, and that addition of vibrato didn’t use arroost (your vocals remind me of David Sylvian’s voice on “God’s Monkey” and just about everything on “The First Day”) 3. I hear perfect rhymes “down” and “clown” - yawn. FYI - what I think I learned about songwriting:... any artform - songs, movies, books, etc. - needs to create tension then (maybe) to resolve the tension. Like playing a Dsus4 chord followed by a D chord. You can create tension on many levels, e.g. melody, chords, lyrics, phrasing, song structure (AABB vs. ABBA vs. ...), line lengths, numbers of bars, rhyming, etc., etc. A “great song” (a “great work of art”) creates tension and release on many levels. You can keep coming back to it and hear new things every time. Not just in repeated listens, but on a time-scale of decades. Simplicity is “lack of nuance”, hence, complexity “contains nuance”. Great works of art appear to be simple, but, have subtle nuance that can be gleaned by repeated study - i.e. layered. Average art is either simple or nuanced, but, not both. Flat, not layered. From a lyric perspective, perfect rhymes imply perfect balance, “closure” and “happiness”. Imperfect rhymes imply imbalance (and, sadness, confusion, longing, etc.). For perfect rhymes, I use rhymezone.com, for imperfect rhymes I use b-rhymes.com. My goto is b-rhymes.com. It gives me 100 possibilities, and causes my mind to wander (“brainstorming”). The music that you’ve created with arroost is “unstable”, and, IMO, perfect rhymes don’t fit in with that theme. [FYI - example. I always loved McCartney’s song “Yesterday”. I tried for decades, but, could never play it and sing it. Then someone (Pat Pattison) pointed out to me that the verse has only 7 bars, not 8. My Engineering mind tried to force singing the song as if it had 8 bars. 7 bars makes the song sound “sadder” and prevents Engineers, like me, from cloning it.]

@Alex McLean That's AMAZING! Thanks for playing! Could I ask what browser and OS you're using? as I notice some visual bugs that I'd like to fix (although I'm also enjoying them here)

I literally have no idea how this works. I've tried everything. I tried an incognito window and turning off three plugins

@Duncan Cragg do you have a microphone attached to (or part of) your computer?

Aha! I think that's broken actually, so .. it's recording sounds I make? I can try a headset, if I can find one..

is there some cultural reference

Not that I'm aware of. It's just a fun toy for playing with sound and thinking about time. If you give it a bit of patience and make a few attempts, you'll arrive at something that at least passes the John Cage bar of "music", if not something that my 70-yo parents or 4-yo daughter might recognize as music.

I'd be happy with the kind of soundz my 61-year old brother makes, tbh

Alex and I were able to get fancier sounds out of this because we're both practiced computer musicians, so we have some extra tools at our disposal. But the sort of thing Elliot made is closer to (what I see as) the spirit of the thing — playing with whatever sound you have handy in a silly new way.

@guitarvydas here's a nice post about how to give humane, constructive feedback https://club.tidalcycles.org/t/some-thoughts-on-sharing-and-constructive-feedback/499

@Duncan Cragg Yes, you are welcome with open arms to the funky sounds club :) The barrier to entry is very low, you just need to make something and share it

I really want to, more than I've wanted to do anything inspired by this forum. I want to show my brother that i can make funky soundz just like him

my advice is to start with a test. this is a test :D

Christ, you've popped far too many neurons in my soggy brain trying to follow that. HELPPP! Right .. it's nearly 1am here, I'm going to go and sleep on it and try again tomorrow

Heh the truth is I couldn't get my microphone running, so pipewired in the audio from the funky drummer sample from a YouTube tab. You can't really go wrong with wonky breakbeat slicing. I also had fun wiring arroost's audio back into itself for a feedback party

👆🏼 prime example of packing 5 alien cultural refs into just two lines on the page... I'm off to bed. 🤣

Duncan is taking an amen break :)

It's 1am here too,I can explain in the morning. Anyway it is a lot of fun, it feels like a strange puzzle with a freaky sequencer as a nice reward for working it out. Although I still don't fully understand it..

I'm sure there are some bugs with the microphone, but if that works, you should hopefully have something to play with :) the puzzle side of it is a huge part of the design. it's intentionally difficult! and it's intended to be provocative, to illicit positive (and negative) reactions. Thank you all for participating so far, this is way better than I imagined :)

Loving this!

@Lu Wilson my microphone problem is a hardware or o/s issue, some days it just doesn't work @Duncan Cragg pipewire is excellent linux feature which transformed it's previous mess of audio stack into something fantastic.. it lets you easily plug one app into another. Third party equivalents on mac are blackhole and soundflower, on windows I think there is something called virtual cables. Funky Drummer is a heavily sampled track by James Brown https://www.whosampled.com/James-Brown/Funky-Drummer/ You can listen to a famous breakbeat from it full of James Brown grunts here A 'break beat' is basically a sample taken from a drum solo in a classic track like this.. Many musical genres and dance music subcultures have been built on them. Breakbeat slicing is where you cut up a breakbeat and reassemble it in a different order. Done a lot in e.g. drum n bass. Here's a code example breaking one into eight pieces and playing them in a different order, with pattern transformations: https://strudel.cc/?hOrzeGQ4Qj0T By feedback I meant instead of using external audio input, I recorded audio from the audio that arroost was already playing.. This got noisy quickly. Whole musical genres are based on this technique too..

@Alex McLean thanks for the *break*down! Every time I see strudel I love it. need to explore it more. hope to meet you at a London live coding thing one day soon!

@Lu Wilson that'd be great ! I saw london meetups are starting up again, I'm up in Sheffield but will have to make it down soon

I can now read your post, @Alex McLean and understand it like a true pro! Thanks so much for de-obfuscating! I've been listening to lots of Amen stuff, also. Like it

@guitarvydas I worked out which video you were referring to. I think you can get more out of it by listening for polymeter. There's a ten beat loop against a seven beat loop which generates really interesting shifting rhythms if you listen for it

For anyone who's interested, I outlined one of the main philosophies behind arroost in my weekly update last week: https://www.todepond.com/pondcast/demo/ Feel free to listen (or read the transcript) without paying for this one!

hi everyone, so many great sounds in this thread! here's two of my scrappy fiddles 🙂

@avon wow thank you so much for sharing your scrappy fiddles! That's the first time I've seen someone experiment with the timing options of wires too 👏 Can I ask at what time/date you made these? Today, I pushed out a change that fixed a bug at great performance cost. I think I can spot some performance issues in the first one, and some bugs in the second one.

the little 4 node experiment was recorded today at 1:57pm, and the other one at 4:25pm eastern time. Though the times might be a bit off because I was just using the same tab without refreshing for a while. Great to hear about a performance update! The issues seen in the clip might also be related to the screen recorder I use bc whenever I launch it my computer becomes a jet engine.

@avon I really enjoyed these. Listened to them several times. I would listen to an album of this.

Thank you for the kind words @Ivan Reese! One thing I wanted to note is that with "normal" DAWs I really dislike working in any sort of "live view". I normally work in an arrangement view hand-placing samples and automation, but I've been enjoying my time in arroost. I think being able to see the real time signal flow helps me get to this place where I feel like I can "play" my arroost patch. Working live has helped me make new types of sounds that are unlike anything I've made before, pretty neat!

@avon ok thank you that's a relief. I pushed out an update in between your two sessions. In the first, I can see the bug but no stuttering. I can second one I can see the stuttering but no bug 😅 I should be able to switch back on the memoisation when I've fixed the bug for real. In fact, I might do that now, as the performance seems like a bigger issue TBH And I'm delighted to hear about your positive experience. That's exactly what I'm going for. I don't want it to be a tool that people use long-term as their primary form of music-making. But I want it to give them a new kind of experience that can stick with them. There's a lot more work to do on it, gotta press on :)

excited to follow the developments!

@avon I think I fixed both of those issues! Let me know if you see anything odd or any performance changes 🙂 https://github.com/TodePond/Arroost/pull/215

Great demo https://x.com/Mappletons/status/1725924058783473996?s=20

Can't believe I was publicly shamed for my arroost music.

@Elliot haha you were celebrated

No I'm just kidding I loved the presentation lol