1. Principles and practices

Final Project

A bit of background

I have been interested by electronic music for half of my life and I've been producing it myself for half a decade already, I studied piano years ago and I've been been geeking on synthesizers for the last couple of years.

I recently started playing the handpan and immediately I got mesmerized by the low barrier of entry it gives to anybody to start making music. The way it's laid out, the fact that all notes follow a scale, the range it has, made me start playing in way that I never would've thought of before, all the while making it feel easy.

This made me reflect on how just changing the interface, you can make it seamless for the player to create structures and melodies that are completely new and inventive, while still remaining fun.

A way in

My idea with this project, is to create a tactile interface that makes it more accessible and enjoyable to create and interact with rhythm, harmony and melody, while giving you room to play and enjoy without having to know a lot of music theory ( but reward those that do ).

For this I want to create a MIDI controller and sequencer, that makes it easy to create full song in minutes. The idea is to create an interface that outputs multiple layers of notes that interact with each other, creating polyrhythms and syncopation.

The magic is in the rhythm 🎶

Most of the popular music we listen to tends to use a 4/4 signature, that means that a measure consists of 4 quarter-notes per measure, and then songs are usually created using multiples of 4, like having an intro that lasts 4 measures followed by a chorus that lasts 8 measures. Besides these overlying repeating structures there's usually variations that happen every X amount of measures, to make thing more interesting and less repetitive, but there's also ways to make different rhythms play with each other.

I want to create an interface that puts all these underlying structures on the front and makes it easy to twist them up and re-arrange them.

Hex Key

If you imagine a path going around a regular hexagon, where each face represents a measure (let's say a 4 quarter-notes per measure) that gives you 6 measures but we want to make it work on multiples of 4.

Well, we could repeat the last 2 measures 1 time, or repeat the first measure 3 times, we could split the hexagon into 3 segments and have each segment play it's 2 measures simultaneously. That's the basic idea, but we can take it further.. What if there's 2 hexagons, where one creates 4/4 measures and the other 3/4 measures? We could even go further and make one hexagon play each of it's 6 faces at the same time, another play 2 segments of 3 measures, one after the other, and have a third hexagon that plays 2 faces segments in a random order...

Getting down to earth

I picture this working as a standalone MIDI step sequencer, where each hexagon face consists of a line of buttons ( with lights) that would allow to enter notes on each hexagon separate from each other. Since we could output up to 16 channels of notes on a single MIDI connection, we could have 4 hexagons with 4 segments each, But I'm inclined to make it a bit more asymmetric, so it would have a 6 segment hexagon with 4/4 measures, a 3 segment hexagon with 3/4 measures and a 2 segments hexagon with a 2/4 measures, plus a channel for live playing ( that would be 12 channels total).

You can check more information in my Final Project page