coll

This patch provides an example of simple interactive improvising program that plays a melody influenced by the notes played by a live performer. Based on the most recently received MIDI note, the program chooses a scale to use for its melody, and moves melodically in a straight line toward the pitch and velocity most recently received. The program has only one use of randomness, to make a probabilistic decision. It has a small musical knowledgebase of three scales, and a set of probabilities determining which scale is more appropriate for use at any time.

This patch enacts a particular type of improvisational behavior, playing a partial statement of a stored motivic phrase. The phrase is stored in a coll (collection) object, as an ordered array of lists, with each list containing three numbers: pitch, velocity, and duration for a MIDI note message. Each time a message comes in the inlet, the patch chooses a transposition of the motive at random, chooses a number of notes to play, and starts a metro to begin counting through the numbered items in the coll.

The coll object allows one to store an indexed collection of messages of any type. In this example, each stored message is a list of five numbers that will be used as pitches of a chord. (Double-click on the coll to view its contents.) The chords are chosen at random, but they have been composed such that they all have a valid function in C minor, and because they are all five-note jazz chords voiced in a similar manner and range, stylistically any one of the twelve chords sounds reasonable following any other.

One way to combine text and video is to write text in jit.lcd as demonstrated in the example “Draw shapes and text

The timepoint object sends out a bang when the transport reaches a specified time position. This can be useful for causing something to happen—or for starting an entire process—at a particular instant during the transport's progress. A timepoint might, for example, even trigger a new time position value to be sent to the transport object itself, thus causing the transport to leap to a different time.

This patch requires the tapoutxfade~ abstraction in the example "Abstraction for crossfading delay times of a remote tapin~ object". When audio is turned on, the tapin~ object sends out the tapconnect message to the three subpatches, thus associating their internal tapout~ objects with the same tapin~.

The coll object stores an indexed collection of messages. You can trigger those messages to be sent out, just by sending coll the index of the desired message. One way that this can be useful is that you can make an entire musical score in the format of a collection of note messages, each of which contains whatever information you consider vital for describing a note. That’s similar to the way that languages like csound and cmusic read a score file to play notes.