Aidan Lane from the Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University, has released Nodal, a generative software application for composing music.
From the Nodal page:
It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). You interactively define the graph, which is then traversed by any number of players who play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes
Nodal does not make any sound by itself ? it only generates MIDI data. Which is the mistake I made myself at first. It is so well put together that I assumed it was a virtual-synth, when I first was exposed to a beta version of the tool a few months ago. After figuring out that it was a tool for generating MIDI data it all came together for me and now it is an essential tool in my own studio.
In fact I used this tool to help generate some of the sounds used in the naw release for the Digital Dub issue - to give you an idea of how this tool can be used.
Nodal is based on an original concept by Jon McCormack. It is free for personal use and available for Mac OS X based computers (Universal Binary).
Visit the Nodal page for more information.
