Show HN: CLAVIER-36 – A programming environment for generative music
clavier36.comCLAVIER-36 is a programming environment for generative music. Programs are laid out in a two-dimensional grid, and evolve over time according to a fixed set of rules. The system is much like a cellular automaton, in that most of the rules governing the evolution of the system are local.
C36 programs describe sequences of discrete events in time. The environment includes a primitive sampler, as a self-contained means of interpreting these events as sound. For full expressivity, though, the system is best used as a generator of data for interpretation by an external musical instrument, such as a synthesizer.
The project was very directly inspired by Orca (https://100r.co/site/orca.html). It began as my own from-scratch implementation of Orca and diverged over time.
It's written in C, and compiled to WASM for the browser.
See the following pages for more info:
about page: https://clavier36.com/about
user manual: https://clavier36.com/manual
tutorial video: https://youtu.be/rIpQmJVMjCA
River (the software author) worked on this during his time at the Recurse Center and it’s been amazing to see him develop it all from scratch in C. (I contributed 2.5 lines of code on the web deployment/firebase side).
He’s a friend, but I am very unbiased in saying that the sample-rate execution of the entire grid seems like an incredible technical achievement.
One of the craziest (super super noisy but fascinating to watch) grids uses just a few “operators” that generate random operators and random values, and place them at random location.
That grid runs - easily! in the browser!! - at 1000 bpm. Forget 60 fps :)
I’ll update my comment linking to this patch so you can take a listen. It’s stunning, organic and very punk.
EDIT: sorry, got away for a few hours
This is the patch:
WARNING - GETS SUPER SUPER LOUD https://clavier36.com/p/tEWcc48tFPm8qiyx9ljo WARNING - GETS SUPER SUPER LOUD
Zoom out using your mouse wheel/trackpad to see it all. It's realllly gorgeous if you let it run. But super, super loud at random times :-)
I'm curious - was it two and a half lines of code you contributed?
I was saying that in jest, ha. More like 2.5% of the code.
Very briefly, I contributed the CI pipeline that makes git push build the wasm and deploy it to a micro server that sets the specific required headers. I used the deployment tool I’ve been working on with a friend, which is called Disco.
There was something about wasm/the audio worklet requiring super specific headers - `Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp` … Nothing too complicated.
The other part I contributed is the loading/saving patches to Firebase, which lets people share compositions.
But all of the audio, grid, ui is all River’s!
CLAVIER is amazing, the wire system alone is such a huge improvement over ORCA, and it's now feasible to make much larger patches and refactor safely, kudos to River for all the hard work on the polish and quality-of-life.
I was testing MIDI on a prerelease build last weekend and it turned out quite nice: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOUUIfeEQWY/
Excited for more folks to get to play with it!
Cool project. I've referred people to Orca before--and the lack of "built in instruments" (and maybe the flow visualization) was a stumbling block. This feels more "consumer friendly" :)
Off topic: where did you get the name from? There's a town Clavier (Claviere in French) in the Italian/French alps.
Clavier is keyboard in French and German (Klavier)
36 because, just like base64 uses 64 characters, clavier uses A-Z and 0-9 :-)
Looks great, I'll have to play with it this weekend! Has a scent of Orca
https://github.com/hundredrabbits/orca
this is a neat project! i know river and he is a very good engineer
Can you see if you can serve the static files over cdn, might speed up the site loading speed. claviar.wasm took 4 minutes to load here. 200MBPS connection
Apologies, I’ll setup a proper CDN and update this message once it’s live. Thanks for the report!
I want to run this on a Steam Deck!
Please wishlist it on Steam, it will help get the word out!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3614060/CLAVIER36/
A Steam version is definitely coming - the biggest question re Steam Deck is how to deal with the input..
Do you use/like any other audio software on the Steam Deck?
Wishlisted! Good luck!
It doesn’t seem to load…
Apologies, it may have to do with the server. I’m on it and will update this message once it’s fixed/better. Thanks!
UK and Firefox 128-esr on linux appears to be loading and working ok