On this hot summer day in Berlin, I thought I should share a pretty weird and nerdy way to use Rhino 3D (NURBS modeller http://www.rhino3d.com/) and the totally awesome, node-based Grasshopper plugin for it (http://www.grasshopper3d.com/) to make music with the help of a GH plugin called "Cicada" (http://www.food4rhino.com/project/cicada).
Cicada gives you several nodes to send notes, pitchbend, CCs and program change and define/select a midi output. I successfully tried it via Grasshopper -> LoopMidi -> Bitwig -> Alchemy with this little patch:
The green timer creates a pulse every 50 ms, triggers "Wandering Vector" generators that create X/Y/Z coordinates ala "drunkards walk", the vectors get unwrapped into their components, scaled to the needed value ranges via expressions, visualized by creating a circle/polygon in the Rhino viewport and finally fed to LoopMidi with the dedicated Cicada-nodes. The CCs modulate the Alchemy X/Y morph parameters.
While this first test has no real practical value other than me finding out how it works, I can see some interesting possibilities in generating notes from geometric objects or create objects from music/midi and 3D-print them... (there is another plugin that can create NURBS curves from audio).
And before you ask, no, I don't recommend Rhino/Grasshopper as a general DAW
I thought this should fit perfectly in the "Saure-Gurken-Zeit" which is how we call the hot time in summer where everybody is on vacation, things are slow and there are not that many news, so more obscure stuff comes to the rescue...
Cheers,
Tom
