Ambient Architect

What it does

A generative composition tool for ambient music that sends MIDI rather than making sound. Eight slots each take a role, drone, harmony, bass, melody, fragment, pulse, texture or dust, and each role has its own rules for octave, voices, how readily it changes and how far it strays from the key. Sixteen play pads along the bottom move the harmony while the piece runs, and a global page sets density, wander, colour, shadow, form and humanize across the whole ensemble. Takes can be recorded and the MIDI exported to Files or dragged into another app.

In the demo

Jade runs it in AUM, feeding eight instruments she already owns, and builds a piece from an empty patch one role at a time while reading out what each rule does. She records a take, exports the MIDI, and drags it into AudioShare and Helium.

Worth knowing

It plays nothing by itself, so the sound depends entirely on the instruments you point it at. It ships with no presets, so every piece starts from an init patch. The app crashes once on camera around 44:00 and an unsaved project is lost.