Station Point

Crafting Tune Artifacts

How To: Algorithmic Music with Ruby, Reaktor, and OSC

Posted on | November 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

The basic idea is to use a sim­ple OSC library avail­able for Ruby to code inter­est­ing music, and have Native Instru­ments’ Reak­tor serve as the sound engine. Tadayoshi Fun­a­ba has an excel­lent site includ­ing all sorts of inter­est­ing Ruby mod­ules.  I grabbed the osc.rb mod­ule and had fun with it.

I’m giv­ing a brief pre­sen­ta­tion at the Bay Area Com­put­er Music Tech­nol­o­gy Group (BAr­C­MuT) meet-up tomor­row, un-offi­cial­ly as part of Ruby­Conf 2009 here in San Francisco.

Here’s a link with down­loads and code from my talk.  It should be all you need to get start­ed, if you have a sys­tem capa­ble of run­ning Ruby, and a copy of Reak­tor 5+ (this should work with the demo ver­sion too).

Ruby mono sequence example:

reak­torOsc­Mono­Se­quences-192 MP3

Ruby poly­phon­ic drums example:

reak­torOscPoly­phon­ic­Drums-192 MP3

Leave a com­ment below if you have any ques­tions, or cool discoveries!

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Comments

2 Responses to “How To: Algorithmic Music with Ruby, Reaktor, and OSC”

  1. Strohan
    December 7th, 2009 @ 8:20 pm

    how excit­ing! Are there any audio exam­ples of music cre­at­ed this way to lis­ten to?

  2. jdn
    February 22nd, 2010 @ 5:35 am

    Hi Beau, I final­ly added audio exam­ples to this blog post. The source func­tions used for each of these is in the down­load link for the talk.

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