The "Glossy" MIDI Setup Family

• GlossyBlack, White, Blue, and Chrome
• GlossyFish
• GlossySticks and GlossyBones
• GlossyFishSticks and GlossyFishBones
• GlossyTracks

These setups are all based on the basic JukeBox concept, where random note and velocity patterns are used to make a simple "song" which is played on a random instrument for a couple of verses. Then the process is repeated with new random parameters.

The difference is that the Glossy setups use multiple concurrent voices, each playing independently with its own random melody and instrument. The random pattern lengths insure that the songs don't all finish and restart at the same time. However, they all use the same scale and share the same tempo, and they play in time (subject to a little intentional "humanizing" variation in GlossyFish and later).

The net effect of the combination is astoundingly better than you might expect after listening to a single-voice Jukebox, giving a unified overall performance that is smoothly and continually changing without ever repeating. It's like a big band "jam session", with 8 random players jamming at any one time. They stay with the beat and scale, but otherwise play what they want for as long as they want, then another player steps up.

GlossyBlack, GlossyWhite, GlossyBlue, and GlossyChrome are all identical except for the scale used.

GlossyFish is similar, but allows you to change the scale at any time via hot-keys. It also includes random Levels, random Hold Beats to slow some voices, and random Note Lags so notes are slightly desynchronized to better simulate real musicians.

GlossySticks and GlossyBones use the same basic strategy, only for percussion. They add 6 non-tonal Percussion voices, plus the original 8 tonal voices playing percussive tonal instruments like Timpani. (Individual GlossySticks Percussion patterns change abruptly, while GlossyBones patterns slowly evolve.)

GlossyFishSticks and GlossyFishBones combine GlossyFish melodies with GlossySticks and GlossyBones percussion, respectively. They also include random percussion-only intro duration, with random times for each tonal instrument to come in after the intro.

GlossyTracks is derived from GlossyFishSticks, but instead of an unending single performance it has discrete "tracks" of controllable duration, after which a new track is automatically begun with all new parameters, including tempo. Instead of hot-key scale selection it selects randomly from an editable list of preferred scales.

All of these setups are driven by random number generators (not Pitch Track output) and are configured to allow a single "seed" value to recreate the exact performance. By default they pick the seed at random, and display it at the lower left of the Pitch-to-MIDI dialog. If you want to hear the performance again, you can copy that value and paste it into the Voice 1 Changes script to supercede the random seed.

Note, however, that the seed values are specific to each setup; the same seed in a different setup will give wildly different results. That's due to the particular order and number of places in which each setup uses random values.

(The Music_from_Anything macro mini-app is derived from GlossyTracks. It only plays a single performance, but instead of random values takes user-supplied image or sound files or live input data, and allows hundreds of adjustments.)

See also Example MIDI Setup Files, MIDI Setup Files, Musical Frontiers, DaqMusiq, KaleidoSynth, Pitch-to-MIDI dialog, Pitch Track Toolbox - Overview, Spectrogram / Pitch Track Controls, Spectrogram / Pitch Track (Sgram/PT)