Ligeti: a process-music composition system

2007-05-20 – I'm close to completing an 0.9 release. You can check out http://dto.freeshell.org/e/ligeti.el but it is not usable yet. I need to write the GUI using cell-mode…

Ligeti is a system for the composition of process music. It is named after the composer György Ligeti. The musician selects from a library of audio "activities". An activity is a template for an audio synthesis process. The activities are arranged into a unified whole through manual sequencing, automated composition, or a combination of the two. The piece is then rendered to disk using csound. The user may create new activities and compositional algorithms.

Ligeti and its user interface are implemented in Emacs Lisp. The following programs are required:

• GNU Emacs 22.X
• Stéphane Rollandin's csound-x for Emacs
• csound

• An "activity" is an abstraction of a csound instrument. Activities are represented as lisp functions that produce csound instrument definitions suitable for csound-x's orchestra code transcription engine. These functions accept full Common Lisp keyword parameter lists and are fully documented.
  • (find-function 'csl-transcribe-to-code)
• An "event" is an abstraction of a csound i-statement. It triggers an activity, causing it to generate sound.
• A "sequence" is a set of events taken together as a bundle. These are simply lisp lists of events.
• A sequence may also be an event, i.e. the sequence itself is triggered at a certain time

• oscillating loops
• drones
• melodic fragments, pointillism
• arhythmic ambient pieces, also technoish stuff

• http://www.flexatone.net/algoNet/