Monday, May 25, 2009

Swing Thing

It's another landmark day for mGen, as today was the first time a post-process module was ever used in the composition process. I made a very simple swing module called Swing Thing that offsets certain notes in the composition to give it a swing feel ranging from "very light swing" to "heavy swing."

The test run sounded great after I got the math down for the swing algorithm, which took a little trial-and-error. I was very impressed with the run time; mGen was showing the swing module as taking only 6% of the total composition time, even though the module had to loop through every single generative part and modify the timing of every single note that fell on a certain beat, which seems like a processor-intensive task. Nonetheless, Swing Thing chewed through the loops in no time.

A swing module was really the only immediate implementation that I could think of for post-processing modules, but it's already proven the power of post-processing to transform the entire composition. I'm sure there will be many more plugins to come.

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