¬¬ name
jmmcd Peer Note-Pool (copyright © James McDermott 2004)

¬¬ purpose
sending note-on messages to generators based on crude probabilistic algorithms.

¬¬ installation
put the .dll and the .html in your gear/generators directory, and the .bmx in your recycle bin. the rest is for developers.

¬¬ menu options

¬¬ generators: assign the note and optionally volume parameters of one generator for each track in the Peer Note-Pool patterns.

¬¬ about: instantly regret the presence of an about box.

¬¬ global parameters

¬¬ prob([C-B]): the *relative* probability that each pitch will be chosen, when the machine is choosing a pitch for you.

¬¬ prob(Off): the note-off message is treated just like any other note.

¬¬ track parameters

¬¬ note: the note sent to each assigned generator.

¬¬ volume: the value sent to the volume parameter of each assigned generator.

¬¬ probability: the probability that a note will be played this tick.

¬¬ centre note: determines the octave in which the notes will be played.

¬¬ octave deviation: determines the amount of randomisation applied to the octave.

¬¬ volume deviation: determines the amount of randomisation applied to the volume.

¬¬ dot-prob: the probability that a note will be played on an empty tick.

¬¬ target track: the generator track to which notes will be sent.

¬¬ on/off: set to on to allow improvisation.

¬¬ attributes
none

¬¬ usage hints
there are a few ways of using this machine. the laziest (and my personal favourite) is to set the note probabilities to correspond to the key i'm working in, turn the dot-prob to a suitable value, and let it play while i work on something else.

if you prefer, you can specify most of your patterns exactly, and allow the machine to improvise only a couple of notes here and there. if you know, for example, that you need a note on tick 20, but don't want to decide what one, set the probability (not the dot-prob) to 100% on that note.

or you can do something in between.

¬¬ known bugs
i don't know anything about midi. does this machine work with midi? should it work differently?

it should be possible to record the notes and volume values sent in the generator's tracks. this *was* working (it should work automatically, without help from the programmer) but it's not now. any ideas?

any suggestions or comments are welcome.

¬¬ source code
the source code for this machine is included for educational and collaborative purposes. feel free to work with it. if you make an improvement to the existing machine, please contact me so we can integrate our changes and make an official release. if you want to base a new machine on this code, go ahead (but release the source code for that too). avoid passing off my work as yours, or vice versa.

a small addition was made to btdsys' Peer Library to enable sending note and volume data at the same time. contact me if you'd like to talk about it.

¬¬ thanks
thanks to oskari, cyanphase, btdsys, and all the devs for making buzz what it is. thanks to btdsys, 7900, usr, and kodream for answering peer questions. thanks to everyone who has released source code. but mostly, especially, many thanks to btdsys for the peer library: it's the best thing that ever happened to buzz.

if you like this machine, and want to thank me for making it, please go and thank other more important developers first. when you're finished, if there is still gratitude in you, you can send me a cd of your music, or a postcard, or an email (jamesmichaelmcdermott@eircom.net), or you can visit www.skynet.ie/~jmmcd, where you'll find out about my band, the moral majority. listen to the songs there and tell me how good they are.