One of the presentations at Wednesday night's DorkbotNYC really stood out: Jason Van Anden's BubbleBeats.
Rather than playing notes one after the other, as music has been done since the Paleolithic Era, BubbleBeats plays sound samples via a series of connected "bubbles". As Van Anden says, "It's an interactive probabilistic music making thingamajig." When asked to elaborate, he confessed "I'm not exactly clear what it is."
To create a composition in BubbleBeats, you upload sound samples. They could be anything -- drumbeats, voice, instrumental melody, even silence. Each sound sample is represented on your screen by a color coded circle: a bubble. Those bubbles can be combined with other musical bubbles into a "foam".
The path that your music takes depends on the density of the foam: the sound of one bubble is followed by any of the other bubbles connected to it. The probability that one sample will be followed by a different sample depends upon the extent to which the bubbles overlap. The more deeply any two sample-bubbles overlap each other, the more likely it is that those bubbles will play sequentially. The result is a musical soundscape that almost never plays the same way twice.
Said Van Anden, "We're not making linear music anymore. We're making kaleidoscopic music."
