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Show HN: CLAVIER-36 – A programming environment for generative music (clavier36.com)

146 points by river_dillon ↗ HN
CLAVIER-36 is a programming environment for generative music. Programs are laid out in a two-dimensional grid, and evolve over time according to a fixed set of rules. The system is much like a cellular automaton, in that most of the rules governing the evolution of the system are local.

C36 programs describe sequences of discrete events in time. The environment includes a primitive sampler, as a self-contained means of interpreting these events as sound. For full expressivity, though, the system is best used as a generator of data for interpretation by an external musical instrument, such as a synthesizer.

The project was very directly inspired by Orca (https://100r.co/site/orca.html). It began as my own from-scratch implementation of Orca and diverged over time.

It's written in C, and compiled to WASM for the browser.

See the following pages for more info:

about page: https://clavier36.com/about

user manual: https://clavier36.com/manual

tutorial video: https://youtu.be/rIpQmJVMjCA

15 comments

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gregsadetsky
River (the software author) worked on this during his time at the Recurse Center and it’s been amazing to see him develop it all from scratch in C. (I contributed 2.5 lines of code on the web deployment/firebase side).

He’s a friend, but I am very unbiased in saying that the sample-rate execution of the entire grid seems like an incredible technical achievement.

One of the craziest (super super noisy but fascinating to watch) grids uses just a few “operators” that generate random operators and random values, and place them at random location.

That grid runs - easily! in the browser!! - at 1000 bpm. Forget 60 fps :)

I’ll update my comment linking to this patch so you can take a listen. It’s stunning, organic and very punk.

xeonax
Can you see if you can serve the static files over cdn, might speed up the site loading speed. claviar.wasm took 4 minutes to load here. 200MBPS connection
Teknomadix
I want to run this on a Steam Deck!
sammy0910
this is a neat project! i know river and he is a very good engineer
nielsbot
Cool project. I've referred people to Orca before--and the lack of "built in instruments" (and maybe the flow visualization) was a stumbling block. This feels more "consumer friendly" :)
santiagobasulto
Off topic: where did you get the name from? There's a town Clavier (Claviere in French) in the Italian/French alps.
rwhaling
CLAVIER is amazing, the wire system alone is such a huge improvement over ORCA, and it's now feasible to make much larger patches and refactor safely, kudos to River for all the hard work on the polish and quality-of-life.

I was testing MIDI on a prerelease build last weekend and it turned out quite nice: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOUUIfeEQWY/

Excited for more folks to get to play with it!

kristopolous
In the video, within the first 10 seconds, I should understand the offering of the product by seeing it.

You can get into the details later but right now I've got no idea what's going on here and don't know why I should invest my time in it.

You need to motivate people by showing off the thing.

Also on the phone it just says basically "go away". Once again, show me some video, song, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, something that would motivate me to switch to a desktop.

scloudfox
Its nice invention by you may i know is it a software only ya product also you are going to feature ?
pell
If you share this link on a public forum like HN you might want to add more than an error message for mobile devices so people might be incentivized to switch to desktop or bookmark it for later.

Otherwise really impressive.

goatking
This project is really cool, love it!

How would someone start learning and implementing something like this? Like, I don't even know what keyword to put into Google.

Are there any articles, blog posts, etc. that you used while researching?