The Well-Sequenced Synthesizer

well-tempered-sequencer

The Well-Sequenced Synthesizer is a series of sequencers that are designed to be physical interfaces to play with traditional music theory.

The sequencers were created by Luisa Pereira, a research fellow at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

The Counterpointer, below, is a cross between an electronic arpeggiator and a baroque music rule book. It takes a melody input and responds with voices that follow the rules of counterpoint:

El Ordenador carves chaos into order by applying constraints to randomly generated chord progressions, inspired by the features of tonality described by Dmitri Tymoczko in A Geometry of Music:

La Mecánica uses a traditional music box mechanism to play back the progressions generated by El Ordenador:

via Luisa Pereira, adafruit

9 thoughts on “The Well-Sequenced Synthesizer

    1. Is this the owner saying I wish I had one of these? These ads must be a joke? This would have been something people would have glazed their eyes over in 1981. These products are terrible!

      1. These aren’t really products per se, the NYU program is more about using technology in musical art and performance. If there’s demand for these, I imagine the artist may do a kickstarter or something, but the intention is probably more along the lines of an art installation.

        I’ve had a few friends come up through the program, I’d love to see more stuff from Tisch on this website. The results don’t always make sense as a commercial product, but are usually pretty interesting. Anyone in the NY area should make a point of checking out their end of year presentations.

    1. You can make sick psytrance melodies anyway, look into counterpoint. Not trying to be a smartarse here but if you want to do something properly, study into it. I know soon there’ll be an app for everything but that doesn’t mean we should stop learning. Note I’m not arguing against the existence of these tools – just the approach that says they are the only way to get results.

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