What This Is
Gilbert Lister Research is a music research micro-laboratory, working on new ideas and products at the intersection of music and coding. And with a particular interest in, and emphasis on, melody.
We love a good tune. And we want to know why. How to make one. And how to encourage more of them in popular music today.
On this site you'll find tools for composition and interactive performance that you can use right now in the browser; reports and discussions of other experiments and work in progress. And, of course, music.
Goldenpond
Goldenpond is a language for describing chord progressions and deriving riffs, arpeggios and other note patterns from them. Instead of writing music as individual notes, you describe it in terms of harmonic function and musical intention.
In the above example, the chord progression is defined with the string "71,74,75,71ii,>3,71,74,73,72,71", while the rhythmic line comes from the "b.>d<> 2".
For a full explanation see Goldenpond and the Goldenpond Tutorial.
Try it
Goldenpond has been integrated into various online tools, including forks of both the Strudel live-coding environment, and the Signal browser based sequencer. And is also available as scripts that can be used in the FL Studio piano-roll.
Listen
Two albums that make heavy use of Goldenpond are Mentufacturer's "Swan and Sugar Loaf" EP, and the earlier "Mentufacturer chases the Green Fairy" officially released by Gilbert Lister Research on the Dionysian Industrial Complex netlabel.
Other Projects
Gbloink!, Slow Controllers and the World of Cake
Gbloink! is an interactive visual music toy that exemplifies the approach to creating dynamic systems where users have "semi-control" over musical outcomes. The orginal Gbloink! (written in 1997 in Visual Basic!) was one of our earliest experiments in creating art toys that balance user input with algorithmic processes.
Gbloink! has since fed into our concepts of synaesmedia and "slow controllers".
Slow Controllers are interfaces where a brief gesture leads to events unfolding over time. We are currently working on "the world of cake", a framework that can be used to create a number of automata based sequencers.
Gates of Dawn
Gates of Dawn is a set of experiments for describing DSP and synthesis engines in code. It started as a Python library to generate Pure Data patches but is expanding to cover further cases (such as Clojure EDN representations of Axoloti patches).
Here the main research question is how to overcome the fundamental mismatch between text (linear or tree-shaped languages) and the graph shape of most audio / DSP architecture.
Piano Slides
When presenting talks about music, it's useful to demonstrate with an on-screen keyboard that can be played via MIDI from a real keyboard. What's really useful is to have such a keyboard built into your slides.
Piano Slides is a reveal.js template we've open-sourced that gives you exactly that. You can write your slides using Markdown as normal, but they all have a MIDI aware, visual piano keyboard for when you need to demonstrate something quickly in the middle of your presentation.
About
Artist Mentufacturer (AKA "Phil") is founder and researcher-in-residence at Gilbert Lister Research. A self-described "industrial kid who grew up to admit a love of melody", he's now trying to figure out how to combine a new interest in harmonic progressions and melody with electronic experimentalism and noise.
See Mentufacturer page for full discography.
For several years Mentufacturer has also run the Synaesmedia YouTube channel. Some of those ideas and experiments will get folded into Gilbert Lister Research as the site develops.
Gilbert Lister Research is a sibling of the Brasilia-based Dionysian Industrial Complex netlabel.
Gilbert Lister Research is open to collaboration with musicians and researchers who share our interests.