Midinous

[Eddy Deegan]

Midinous is a sequencer with a little bit of a difference. It's a piece of software that generates MIDI data via little dots called 'travellers' that traverse paths between nodes on a grid, generating a note when they encounter a node.

You can place the nodes arbitrarily and set properties for them to determine things such as the MIDI channel, note, duration and velocity. Nodes also come in different types which influence how they route travellers forwards if there are multiple connections to that node. This results in things like random routing (the traveller will be sent down a random outward path), round-robin routing (the traveller will be sent down the paths one at a time in turn), chord-triggering (the traveller will be duplicated such that all the outbound paths have a traveller sent down them) and so on.

It's huge fun to play with and I found it strangely inspiring as well as relaxing. You can edit the various nodes and paths in realtime as the sequence is playing although there is a little bit of a knack to it.

It's easier to show than tell, so here's a little video I made of my first jam with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzn3xLOo6Ts

I'll certainly be doing more with it going forward; as a creative tool for unexpected inspiration it's hard to beat.

Midinous is only available through the Steam distribution platform unfortunately, but you don't need to be running the Steam client to launch it once installed.

[Drew Stephenson]

Very cool. Out of curiousity, how long did it take to come up with and programme that piece? Roughly.

[Eddy Deegan]

About 3 hours I think... give or take. Plus another hour overhead for selecting and extracting the vocal sample snippets from the old film. It was the first time I'd used Midinous though so some of that was pondering/head scratching/experimenting to get used to it a bit!

[Folderol]

Very interesting, but not for me.

[BJG145]

Awesome, the animated connections remind me of Rotor, or the odd graphical sequencers people have put together for Norns. I haven't seen anything quite like that before though.

[Ben Asaro]

Oh this is neat, reminds me of Nodal, which I spent hours and hours on!