The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

And now you truly can get fresh acid anytime, anywhere! Absolutely amazing project. This is actually like... 75% passable, and better than most entry level stuff I've heard.

I've wanted this to exist for like 15 years. Tried my hand at it with Reason back in like, 2012, got kinda there with RPG-8, Jupiter and way too much automation, but it was just way too limiting of a medium back then. This makes me want to take another stab at it.

Some minor suggestions:

- on mobile: Not sure which interfaces are clickable but nonresponsive, vs not clickable at all. E.g. BPM knob didn't do anything for me on mobile, but worked fine on desktop

- I realize this might be hard for browser, maybe with a node/electron app, but MIDI out would be dope.

- Distortion module

- A simple mix-out EQ would be nice.

- Constraints to make sure one osc is always on a bass part

- third osc? :)

- What would really sell it is some lead-in before a pattern change. E.g. When the cycler starts to flash red (especially when they are all about change), occasionally toss in some snare fills/crescendos

If you had a sample board, you could easily convince someone this was made by a human. Maybe inexperienced, but still very much human.

Back in the early days, I think CSound[0] was the big software, not because it can make especially interesting sounds compared to more "musical" software synths, but because it's a proper programming language which gives people the freedom to do these higher level abstractions.

In the hardware world, a lot of this developed out of arpeggiators and analog sequencers. I remember years ago I had a "P3" sequencer[1] which implemented a lot of these sorts of algorithmic pattern generaton tools - you could do things like quantize to a scale, then set a sequence of percentages that themselves impacted the likelihood of a particular note being played. I see there is a new version of this sequencer[2] too.

Lots of analog sequencers provide similar features, and if you have a modular setup you can ramp the tempo way down and have them control chord progressions or swells instead of 16th note patterns. Pretty sure this is how a bunch of live ambient music was done back in the day.

That was a fairly niche corner of electronic composition, but even in the mainstream of 20 years ago stuff like the Emu Proteus sound modules featured pretty advanced programmable arpeggiators where you could essentially write the skeleton of a musical sequence and then modify what notes of it actually ended up getting played by deciding which original notes to start from. I always came at this more from that minimal/techno/sequence-based side, but then I went to a wedding and saw a wedding singer playing an "accompaniment" keyboard which showed the other side - entire chord sequences and backing instrumentation getting generated in real-time based just on what chord the keyboard player chose to hit with their left hand. It's surely only a small step forward from there to being able to input a higher level algorithm that could develop a whole song.

[0] https://csound.com/

[1] https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sequentix-p3

[2] https://www.sequentix.com/shop/cirklon-hardware-sequencer

Maybe put a row of buttons at the top: "I am [Loving it] [Grooving] [Fine] [A Bit Bored] [About to Quit]". Then use that (plus browser data and window-close data) to train ML models to maximize engagement. Or perhaps to hook it up to facial expression recognition.

When I watch friends DJ, there's this great feedback loop between how the crowd's behaving and what they're putting on. They're clearly using the music to achieve certain mental states among listeners. I'd love to see how well that can be done algorithmically.