Polyphony v0.4.0 (initium) for Sonic Pi

Contents

• Intro
• Setup
• Ensemble Setup
• Quick Settings
• Questions and Comments

Intro

Make music with Polyphony. Ideate. Compose. Perform.

This project is under active development.

Setup

In Sonic Pi, run the following:

load "LOCATION/20210323-polyphony/polyphony.rb"
run

Replace LOCATION with the location of the project. E.g.

load "~/OneDrive/music-production/sonic-pi/20210323-polyphony/polyphony.rb"
run

Ensemble Setup

N.B. MIDI instruments should be placed before Sonic Pi instruments, so that channels align as expected.

Within settings.rb:

• enter/edit instruments in MIDI_INSTRUMENTS
• enter/edit instruments in SPI_INSTRUMENTS
• enter/edit an array of instruments in ENSEMBLES
• for ensemble in ARTICULATED > performance and SUSTAINED > performance of settings.rb, set the appropriate ensembles
• if using MIDI:
  • set up (a) MIDI cable(s) and make sure Sonic Pi recognises it as (a) MIDI out port(s)
  • under ports in ARTICULATED > performance > midi and SUSTAINED > performance > midi, replace the array entries with the appropriate MIDI out ports, as named in Sonic Pi
  • set the MIDI channels at your endpoint (DAW and/or hardware) to correspond with the instruments in the ensemble (starting with channel 1 for the first instrument)
  • N.B. any instruments (of any kind) more than 16 will automatically be mapped to the next MIDI port(s), because each MIDI port only has 16 channels

Quick Settings

All settings can be found in settings.rb.

RANDOM

Setting	Values	Description
seed	int [0,]	random seed

SPACE

Setting	Values	Description
initialKey	int 0-11, [any heptatonic scale]	key signature (0-11 corresponds to C-B)

TIMEKEEPING

Setting	Values	Description
unitsPerMinute	(0,)	tempo
timeLimitInUnits	[0,] || nil	nil performs forever

VOICES

Setting	Values	Description
selection	"articulated", "sustained"	voice sections to use

ARTICULATED and SUSTAINED

Setting	Values	Description
ensemble	(ensembles from ENSEMBLE)	ensemble to use
ports	MIDI out port from sonic pi	ports to use

Questions and Comments

The GitHub wiki offers a more in-depth look at the program. That said, a lot is to be figured out from playing with the source code itself.

Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter! (@0delphini)