Who uses Noatikl

[pckvr]

Thanks for the pdf manual!!

Man, I bought Noatikl many moons ago and it brought me much joy. I never expected to read so much critique.

Generative tools in general seem to be quite polarizing, in my experience!

Many artists seem to be in some way offended by them. Others embrace them - but that stage can take some time.

For me, clearly (as I've been doing this for 20 odd years), I just love generative art; and I love the challenge of creating generative tools for people to use.

For me, appreciating generative art is a little like watching a river flow by, listening to a piano impro, or looking at clouds in the sky; the movement and unpredictability simply isn't something that you get with fixed recordings.

To create generative art, you need to develop the ability to be able to sit back and contemplate a little what the system is creating with you; you need to have the ability to delegate and make higher-level decisions (and dive-in to make detailed tweaks when you need to). It is a very creative process for me, but clearly there is a spectrum of people who simply do things in different ways.

Anyhow: I just try to rise above it all and work as hard as I can to create tools that I believe in.

Best wishes,

Pete

[osiris]

I've looked this up, but still don't understand - what is generative music? Do you plug in some parameters and let the software compose the music?

[Spitfire31]

As I mentioned in the other Noatikl 2 thread, the current Mac build should be viewed as a potential alpha - it immediately crashed itself and every host (AU and VST) I tried the demo in on 10.6.8, MB Pro. I didn't even get a glimpse of the GUI.

As you can imagine, I lost interest.

What's the point of premarurelyreleasing something that is obviously a long way from a being a useable, robust product (on the Mac)? It can only lead to bad will and scare away people who might be curious about the concept.

I don't think I'll jeopardise my carefully tweaked Win 7 partition by trying to install it there…

/Joachim

[ariston]

For me, appreciating generative art is a little like watching a river flow by, listening to a piano impro, or looking at clouds in the sky; the movement and unpredictability simply isn't something that you get with fixed recordings.

To create generative art, you need to develop the ability to be able to sit back and contemplate a little what the system is creating with you; you need to have the ability to delegate and make higher-level decisions (and dive-in to make detailed tweaks when you need to). It is a very creative process for me, but clearly there is a spectrum of people who simply do things in different ways.

Well said. It's a different approach, and it yields different results. I like a combination of generative and intentional music; use the generated sound as a backdrop or starting point and branch out from there. It's almost like jamming with another musician who will always surprise you, and challenge you to follow him lead.

I usually use some Max4Live devices to produce generative music, but I'll check out Noatikl, see what it can do.

[pckvr]

As I mentioned in the other Noatikl 2 thread, the current Mac build should be viewed as a potential alpha - it immediately crashed itself and every host (AU and VST) I tried the demo in on 10.6.8, MB Pro. I didn't even get a glimpse of the GUI.

As you can imagine, I lost interest.

What's the point of premarurelyreleasing something that is obviously a long way from a being a useable, robust product (on the Mac)? It can only lead to bad will and scare away people who might be curious about the concept.

I don't think I'll jeopardise my carefully tweaked Win 7 partition by trying to install it there…

/Joachim

Quite - crashes are what you'd call "non-ideal" but of course they come-up in every product that ever gets released. The key is how they get responded to - so it'd be great if you could send-in a crash log.

Noatikl 2 has been work-in-progress since last year, and we've certainly not rushed it out

Off the top of my head, I'd speculate that there something about your audio / MIDI device environment that is tripping it up, that sort of thing can certainly happen, and it'd be tremendous to track down whatever it is that is causing your problem.

Best wishes,

Pete

[pckvr]

I usually use some Max4Live devices to produce generative music, but I'll check out Noatikl, see what it can do.

Thanks ariston - and if you haven't yet tried Mixtikl, do please give that a go as well. Mixtikl is now at version 5, we keep working hard to try to improve it!

Best wishes,

Pete

[pckvr]

I've looked this up, but still don't understand - what is generative music? Do you plug in some parameters and let the software compose the music?

Sorry osiris, you know how it is, sometimes you can be so immersed in something that you forget that not everybody knows about your specialist field!

In outline, you've got it. Software that "knows" a lot about music (harmony, structure etc.) is manipulated by you, to create a real-time stream of music (that could be MIDI, synthesized audio, or some combination of the two). It is a pretty active academic field, and there are also some commercially available programs such as Noatikl and Mixtikl. Every system has a "signature" of sorts, but richly featured systems also let you impose your own signature on top.

This approach has been around for a long time, but not many people are particularly aware of it. Koan for example, the precursor to Noatikl, was first released for Windows way back in 1994...
http://www.intermorphic.com/company/index.html#Koan

Here are a couple of links that help to explain some of the background, I hope they help!

http://www.intermorphic.com/tools/noati ... music.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music#Software

And for an article about artists using these techniques:
https://indieethos.wordpress.com/2011/1 ... ent-music/

Best wishes,

Pete

[Gamma-UT]

I've looked this up, but still don't understand - what is generative music? Do you plug in some parameters and let the software compose the music?

In general, you create rules that guide random processes - with any luck, the output is musical. You don't have to play the notes but getting rules that work is tricky.

[pckvr]

In general, you create rules that guide random processes - with any luck, the output is musical. You don't have to play the notes but getting rules that work is tricky.

Well, with a good Generative music system, you'll get 'musical' output right out of the box!

Most generative systems will let you go seriously off-piste, of course...!

Best wishes,

Pete

[osiris]

http://www.palette-mct.com/index.html
Is it like this software. I've used both of these with good results. They have a difficult learning curve, but it generates a midi file with what it comes up with. I think these are very old, but I wish they'd be developed more.

[pckvr]

Yeah, there are a lot of great ideas that come and go.

Sticking with this field like we have has been a hard road - but great fun.

Our current big focus is bring Noatikl 2 to mobile - tools need to adapt to changing platforms, or they simply die off...!

There are a lot of opportunities in generative mobile audio tools, however, if you want to think outside the box. For example, the content you create with both Mixtikl and Noatikl can be easily shared with the world via twitter... as you can see from content links here:

http://www.intermorphic.com/social.html

... which is kind of fun knowing that potentially anybody with a copy of (say) Mixtikl (even Mixtikl Free for iOS) can hear your music with very little distribution effort!!

The "tikls" that you tweet from Mixtikl or Noatikl, contain all music rules and sound definitions, so your music should sound the same (albeit generatively different!) wherever your public finds your music.

Of course, this won't necessarily be of much interest to desktop DAW/VSTi gurus. But it is pretty cool for people who come into music from mobile devices and twitter!

Best wishes,

Pete

[UncleAge]

At their website it states the "Desktop Standalone for *Mac OS X only*" will be thru the AppStore (once approved). Does this mean there will not be a demo for the standalone version only the plugin version? For me this would matter because I would like to have it piped (output) to several different midi channels at once and I don't see how a plugin can do that in Live unless it can access the IAC bus directly like Consequence can.

Noatikl can drive a single MIDI device directly (e.g. IAC on Mac) - that has been how users of the Noatikl 1.x plug-in variants had to use it!

HTH

Pete

Please clarify this for me... When the Noatikl plugin gives access to the IAC bus does it allow access to more than one midi channel at a time? Also, are there AU & VST options?

[pckvr]

Hi!

Noatikl merges its data from all voices to one MIDI output device.
We hope to add support for multiple MIDI devices at some point, but are too busy to do that right now...!

You'll find quite a lot of info on using MIDI output from the VSTi/AU here:
http://www.intermorphic.com/tools/noati ... ral_7.html

Noatikl comes in three flavours for Mac:
- Standalone App (this is coming via the Mac App Store, when it gets approved...!)
- VSTi (from the Intermorphic store)
- Audio Unit (from the Intermorphic store)

For Windows, Noatikl is available:
- Standalone App (from the Intermorphic store)
- VSTi (from the Intermorphic store)

So that covers a few bases.

We also have versions for both iOS and Android in the works.
Plenty to keep us busy.

Best wishes,

Pete

[UncleAge]

It merges its data from all voices to one MIDI output device.
We hope to add support for multiple MIDI devices at some point, but are too busy to do that right now...!

First of all let me say thanks for trying to help. The above statement led me to believe that you did not understand what I was getting at. However, the link you provided did answer my second question. This leads back to my first question that needs an answer. Let me explain...

I have demo'd Noatikl in the past (quite some time ago). I am familiar with the general idea. My only interest at this point would be in the standalone app. This is because I am only interested if I can address multiple channels (multiple devices don't concern me). So, my original question remains... If the app is only available via Apple's AppStore then how would I be able to demo the standalone app?

[pckvr]

First of all let me say thanks for trying to help. The above statement led me to believe that you did not understand what I was getting at.

I got there in the end.

However, the link you provided did answer my second question. This leads back to my first question that needs an answer. Let me explain...

I have demo'd Noatikl in the past (quite some time ago). I am familiar with the general idea. My only interest at this point would be in the standalone app. This is because I am only interested if I can address multiple channels (multiple devices don't concern me). So, my original question remains... If the app is only available via Apple's AppStore then how would I be able to demo the standalone app?

Well, if you require multi-channel MIDI out, then Noatikl won't meet your needs, I'm sorry to say. Hopefully you'll keep an eye out for future updates that might address this! NB: you *might* be able to use e.g. MidiPipe to split-out the MIDI Data per channel, but I'm not entirely sure about that...

The only way to get the standalone app for Mac would be through the App Store - assuming Apple eventually approve it! (we're going that route for all our Mac standalone apps to help deal with the awful piracy problems that we've suffered from in the past), so the way to try it out for free would be to use the Plug-in version... but I know you don't want to try that variant.

Sorry I can't be of more help on that point!

Best wishes,

Pete