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Baroque Melody Generator 3000

May 16, 2020 - Personal Projects
Baroque Melody Generator 3000

This is the standalone version of the music system created for Bird Ladies, a narrative game I worked on between 2018 and 2020.

Thanks to Clément Duquesne (https://spotline.itch.io/) for the great feedback and Katy for the editing of all the text content.

Feel free to download and play around with it. Share your best melodies, use it with your favourite silent movie, or use it as dynamic music ambience for a fancy tabletop role-playing game ;)


You can see here how it sounds in Unity and what kind of music parameters can be driven by narration and gameplay variables.

The whole generative music logic and both instruments synthesised in real time (the harpsichord and the organ) have been done in Pure Data. The Heavy compiler made by Enzien Audio was then used to generate two Wwise source plugins (one per instrument) out of the Pure Data patches.

The pattern-based melody generation gives much better results than the fully random Markov chain-based generation that I had earlier in the project and that lacked structure.

This is how the Bird Ladies’ generative baroque music sounded in Pure Data at the beginning:
– rough synthesised (Karplus-Strong-based) harpsichord instrument
– very simple music logic that lacks structure
– simple trill system to make the whole thing more baroque, which then got replaced by a better ornamentation system which does grace notes, mordents, and turns.

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