C36 programs describe sequences of discrete events in time. The environment includes a primitive sampler, as a self-contained means of interpreting these events as sound. For full expressivity, though, the system is best used as a generator of data for interpretation by an external musical instrument, such as a synthesizer.
The project was very directly inspired by Orca (https://100r.co/site/orca.html). It began as my own from-scratch implementation of Orca and diverged over time.
It's written in C, and compiled to WASM for the browser.
See the following pages for more info:
about page: https://clavier36.com/about
user manual: https://clavier36.com/manual
tutorial video: https://youtu.be/rIpQmJVMjCA
He’s a friend, but I am very unbiased in saying that the sample-rate execution of the entire grid seems like an incredible technical achievement.
One of the craziest (super super noisy but fascinating to watch) grids uses just a few “operators” that generate random operators and random values, and place them at random location.
That grid runs - easily! in the browser!! - at 1000 bpm. Forget 60 fps :)
I’ll update my comment linking to this patch so you can take a listen. It’s stunning, organic and very punk.
Very briefly, I contributed the CI pipeline that makes git push build the wasm and deploy it to a micro server that sets the specific required headers. I used the deployment tool I’ve been working on with a friend, which is called Disco.
There was something about wasm/the audio worklet requiring super specific headers - `Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp` … Nothing too complicated.
The other part I contributed is the loading/saving patches to Firebase, which lets people share compositions.
But all of the audio, grid, ui is all River’s!
This is the patch:
WARNING - GETS SUPER SUPER LOUD https://clavier36.com/p/tEWcc48tFPm8qiyx9ljo WARNING - GETS SUPER SUPER LOUD
Zoom out using your mouse wheel/trackpad to see it all. It's realllly gorgeous if you let it run. But super, super loud at random times :-)
How would someone start learning and implementing something like this? Like, I don't even know what keyword to put into Google.
Are there any articles, blog posts, etc. that you used while researching?
I was testing MIDI on a prerelease build last weekend and it turned out quite nice: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOUUIfeEQWY/
Excited for more folks to get to play with it!
Otherwise really impressive.
36 because, just like base64 uses 64 characters, clavier uses A-Z and 0-9 :-)
You can get into the details later but right now I've got no idea what's going on here and don't know why I should invest my time in it.
You need to motivate people by showing off the thing.
Also on the phone it just says basically "go away". Once again, show me some video, song, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, something that would motivate me to switch to a desktop.
CLAVIER-36 is a musical instrument, so it will necessarily take some time to master it.
You can jump to 7:14 in the video - https://youtu.be/rIpQmJVMjCA?feature=shared&t=434 - to hear and see how it works. It's a grid based instrument, where you place "operators", or functions on the grid.
That's the 10 second version. The longer version will require a bit of a time investment unfortunately. But it's quite interesting once/if you get into it and start making patches.
@rwhaling posted one of his compositions: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOUUIfeEQWY/ hopefully that's more what you were looking for?
Also, if you click OP's link - https://clavier36.com/p/LtZDdcRP3haTWHErgvdM - you should be brought to an example patch. Is that working for you? Unfortunately, a mobile version is not available right now (it would be tricky to port it, without having to dramatically rethink the UI).
Cheers
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3614060/CLAVIER36/
A Steam version is definitely coming - the biggest question re Steam Deck is how to deal with the input..
Do you use/like any other audio software on the Steam Deck?
0: https://www.audiosymmetric.com/ooda.html (same person for Zoa) 1: https://midinous.com