Follow Actions in Abelton Live
There are a few steps to ‘automating’ ‘music’ (both words worthy of sneer quotes)… one of which is letting the piece continue without input while staying dynamic. Letting the participant effect the piece must alter the thread, but it needs to continue.
Half of our system is Abelton Live, so the follow action is a key. Here is a link some info on that…
http://www.ableton.com/pages/tips/2004_11
However, whether to continue the piece with follow actions or let silence happen will be part of the system as well.
I love this project’s idea. I use Ableton to make my music and would have loved to help work on sound design and sequencing thru Ableton. My Uncle Kevin helped with building the structure and showed me the link to this project.
I love it! Want to see more videos and hear it in action!
About follow actions and silence, as an Ableton enthusiast, is that you can “follow with silence” very easily enough by using a “dummy clip” or a blank audio file or blank midi file. I know that’s obvious but might not be obvious depending on how much you know Ableton.
It would be neat to coordinate follow actions by laser-sensing people jumping thru hoops or some other elaborate directed motion that could be differentiated and routed to midi control follow actions or other effect parameters, so people could sequence a song and change parts and loops by jumping thru the hoop at the right moment. This could be a smaller sub-area of the whole structure, or side area, dedicated to more direct effect manipulation, sequencing, and “scene” changes in Ableton. The follow actions keep in continuing when people are not using that portion of it… Just a friendly idea from a friendly fan of the project!
Peace,
Brenden