9 thoughts on “WaveDNA Intros Liquid Rhythm Lets Your Work With The ‘Molecular DNA’ Of Rhythms”

1. I keep hoping that developers will begin to embrace diversity of meters, allowing any number of beats and any number of beat divisions on any beat. As someone who experiments with unusual meters and tuplets, I was hoping that “liquid” meant ‘infinitely flexible’. The opening video gives the impression that this is much more limited to making typical 4/4 dance beats. I can see how some people will find this useful, I’m just so tired of software that puts unnecessary limits on creativity.

2. Not impressed. Euclidean Pattern Generator is free and provides much more real power: http://www.hisschemoller.com/2011/euclidean-pattern-generator-1-1-osc-support/

   1. There’s also an iPad app called Metronomics that is a metronome with mind-blowing capabilities. The velocity control is less easy to tweak, and the sounds are more limited, but is very LIQUID when it comes to mixing meters, tuplets, anything you can imagine.

3. Does anyone still play music ?

   1. Unfortunately no, they just click away at their one button mouse until something bland and uninteresting forms itself, thus making the creator a fully fledged artist.

   2. That is the perennial question– i.e., what is the value of learning to play instruments (or even one)? It can be followed by: should everyone learn music theory? Is it bad that lay-people can create music using computers? Should a non-musician be stuck in the audience, or can they interact with music in a more engaged way?

      The fact that this software may get used by both professional musicians, professional tweakers, and novices doesn’t bother me. The fact that it shoves boring rhythms down our throats is more annoying.

4. I watch some more detailed videos, this has a snap feature that you can turn off and it looks very flexible, not just standard 4/4 jackhammer. It certainly doesn’t discourage dance beats but it has me curious. I like the effort to represent velocity and timing in innovative ways, sorta neat.

5. The science behind this looks pretty deep. There’s a pdf that digs into it:

   http://www.wavedna.com/downloads/LR-MoleculeBasicsGuide(V.1).pdf

   To the “Does anyone still play music ?” guy – yes, playing music is important, but so is creating new music. And new tools can help you experiment and discover new sounds, new rhythms, new melodies, etc that you would not have otherwise discovered. YOU still have to supply the musicianship.

6. Hello folks,

   We appreciate the feedback and discussion. I’ll try to address a few points that have come up.

   It’s true that at present Liquid Rhythm works within the confines of 4/4 time signatures (or ‘equivalents’ such as 8/8). We certainly understand any disappointment with this current limitation (and apologize if the “liquid” moniker mislead). As you might imagine, time signature flexibility is very high on our list of intended development streams, and we will be providing notice when get clearer on timelines for this. The tricky part about it for us is that we intend on giving alternate time signatures the same kind of thorough treatment we currently give for 4/4. For instance, the Molecule Maps in Liquid Rhythm lay out and index all the building blocks for any possible rhythm in 4/4. One of the Maps is dedicated to all the possible subdivisions of an 8th note, and this Map will stay the same for any time signature. The second Map, however, currently presents all of the possible combinations of active 8th-note “windows” across bars in 4/4, and this Map would grow in size substantially for time signatures with more than 8 beats across a bar. (For 4/4 there are 256 combinations, while for 12/8 there would be 4096, so presenting all of the available options in a way that can be easily navigated is a challenge, but we have some ideas…)

   While “infinite flexibility” is a noble ideal and a continuing motivation, please bear in mind that this is an early version of our first application. Our root technology is applicable to multiple time signatures as well as tonal music analysis and composition aids, but we have made a choice to concentrate on building a succession of applications that provide a deep dive into the different corners of music creation rather than one monolithic application that does a bit of everything (territory covered well by the various DAWs).

   That said, please note that Liquid Rhythm itself is genre and style agnostic. Our musician/developer/videographers show how they use the software to make their own music, so they may give a false sense of style limitation for the software. As more videos and examples are added, this impression will fade. Indeed, one of the most popular features of Liquid Rhythm is the “BeatSeeker”–a set of pre-loaded genre-based displays that highlight popular building blocks used by each instrument type on the Molecule Maps to guide your choices in constructing a beat. There are 12 different genres at present from country to hip hop, and users can construct their own BeatSeeker Map based on files of their own choosing. (The pre-loaded Maps are based on MIDI versions of rhythm tracks from well-known genre-defining songs.)

   A final gesture to the discussion about the relationship between musicianship, creativity and the tools used in pursuit of them: This is a big topic, and certainly one on which we have many thoughts which would be best presented in a more comprehensive article or essay, so I’ll try to be brief here. It seems clear to us that all tools can both enable creativity and confine it, usually both simultaneously. In the case of music, we feel that the deepest or most basic “choice of tools” involves the way the music creator represents musical structure. The most important representation is, of course, the one the creator has in his or her head (the “form of the idea”, so to speak). For a composer trained in (and working in) standard notation (for instance), we suppose the work comes easily if the composer can “think it” in terms of standard notation. Arguably, however, music made by people who think/work in standard notation can discernibly begin to all sound somehow characteristic of SN-based compositions. Similar stories can be told about psychedelic jam-bands and multitrack tape decks, early electronic music and digital sequencers and drum machines, and so on (we feel). To this end, we are supplying (first and foremost) a new way of representing musical structures that we hope will enable new ways of approaching composition, and thus lead to new and original musical experiences for all of us (while also making analysis and comparisons that can quantify musical similarities and differences more tractable).

   Sorry for carrying on, but hopefully this will help let you in our thinking. Also note that we have just updated the overview page on our website to provide more descriptions of what Liquid Rhythm can do (or not currently do).

   http://www.liquidrhythm.com

   Thanks for your time and consideration.

   -WaveDNA team.