I'm curious to know how you use tone.js in a creative way, as I have seen it as a framework for developing musical apps, not a creative tool in itself. Also, do you sync the hardware devices with js stuff, if so how?
I have been at it for a very short period of time but I mainly think in terms of what cycles can i make that will rarely repeat themselves and result in interesting compositions.
Typically I start by defining a main loop, and then have a synth of my choosing randomly select notes and timings. I listen to this randomness until I realize what I don't like about it, then I change the parameter.
Something that helps is every time I instantiate a Tone object I make sure to copy paste the entire params from the Tone API, that way the code itself is the "knobs and buttons" I am used to fiddling with on a real synth.
This is a brian eno tip but I listen to the track at x2-x4 the bpm of what I actually want the track to end up being, it makes protoyping faster while still allowing complex composition.
I keep adding loops and chaining effects until I find something 'almost' complete that needs a human nonrandom touch.
Then I connect my PC output to my OP-1, record the output onto a track, and finish the song on my OP-1.
I plan on recording the midi output of my op-1 and feeding that into Tone so that I can record some more complicated key movements without having to literally program each key press and release. The path is OP-1 MIDI->MIDItoJSON->Tone.js
If you do know of a programming language/library/software like Tone.js but more suited to generative audio I am 100% interested in this field. I am looking to pursue creative coding once I am out of undergrad. I see it as an easy way to stay away from RDBMS which make me feel a sense of corporate dread.
Okay, nice! There are a bunch of langs/environments like chuck, supercollider, MAX. What fits best is mainly about style and preference. A nice way to learn about setups/approaches is to watch algorave videos.
Thank you so much for that list of tech to check out! There are clear limitations with tone.js (mainly me not understanding js syntactic sugar) . I'll check out algoraves too thank you again!
