[sdiy] Samchillian Anyone?

[Scott Nordlund]

> The gist of the control is that "notes" are sounded relative to the
> last note that was sounded. That is, if you keep pressing the "+1"
> key, notes in sequence will be sounded in order. There are many
> scales implemented and others possible. A demo video showed some
> microtonal scales in use. PC keyboards are so cheap that hacking a
> couple to obtain the requisite guts is quite inexpensive.

I'd posted a little about this before in context of algorithmic music.
You can generate interesting melodies and chord progressions from a 
repeating sequence of increments, I think it's conceptually somewhere
between circle of fifths and serialism.  It works better for different
scales (i.e. 19 TET) since you'll only iterate through the entire
12 TET chromatic scale if the total sequence transposes by either 1, 
5, 7 or 11 semitones, where as 19 TET can make a "circle of anything"
since it's prime.  I've done this manually but it's very tedious.

I don't think it would be too difficult to make something similar 
that works on standard MIDI input.  It might be interesting to control
from something like a drum machine sending out MIDI notes.  Could be 
an nice alternative to a straight arpeggiator or analog sequencer, 
perhaps giving some interesting qualities to standard "Berlin school" 
sequences.