Samplebrain

It's not often that a cutting-edge musician helps to create a piece of open source audio software, but that's exactly what has happened with the release of Samplebrain. The musician involved is Aphex Twin, a genre-creating iconoclast of electronic music who has dabbled in everything from ambient drones and atmospherics, through transcendent MIDI-triggered piano pieces, to glitchy industrial noise. And if you know anything about Aphex Twin, you'll know it's the latter that has dominated his recent output. You should also be prepared for the kind of sounds Samplebrain can make. Samplebrain isn't an audio application to help you sound like Erik Satie or Johann Sebastian Bach. Instead, it's the kind of application that's going to summon the local dog population with its disjointed output of high pitch noise and distortion, but if you're into experimental electronic music, that is not such a bad thing.

Samplebrain operates on two different kinds of audio file inputs. One is a set of audio samples, and the other is the long file you wish to process. The set of audio files can be imported individually or as the contents of a directory, and the processing works best if they're short, percussive, and cover a variety of timbres and sounds. These become the contents of the brain, and Samplebrain creates a model of those sounds by cutting and connecting together the fragments that contain similar harmonics. It then analyzes the target file and attempts to swap out sections with similar-sounding slices in the brain. The result is something that preserves an essence of the original inputs while at the same time completely transforming them into a cloud of disjointed noise. It's a mix between the sound of a broken optical drive, a ZX Spectrum loading screen, digital aliasing, pitch shifting, and the ultra quick millisecond repeats of a granular synth. You can even manipulate the live input from a microphone and produce a stereo sound cloud of noise from mono sources. The output can then be mixed with the input, and you can save the recording as you tweak the values in real time so that the output represents a kind of live glitchy performance.

The amount of disjointedness can be manipulated by adjusting the many attributes littered throughout the main window. You can change the algorithm used to match the sample blocks, the size of the blocks, and the levels of "novelty," "boredom," and "stickiness" to help ensure similar blocks aren't repeated. Getting a reasonable sound takes considerable effort and luck, but it's also a lot of fun. Small tweaks to irrelevant parameters create huge changes in the output, and you can almost perform those changes live to turn Samplebrain into an improvised audio mangling effect. This is likely the original intention, because it's also possible to remotely control these values using OSC, a protocol often used to automate modern synths and lighting. That would allow Aphex Twin to twiddle with the sound remotely alongside his rank of synthesizers and Eurorack modules and mixers, which is where the output from Samplebrain best fits.

Project Website

https://gitlab.com/then-try-this/samplebrain

Samplebrain transforms perfectly recorded audio into something that sounds broken, incoherent, and totally unintentional, which must surely have been the intention.

To prepare you for what the output sounds like, here's a spectrogram and frequency map of the typical output.

360-degree platformer

ROTA

The Godot games engine has improved rapidly over recent months, thanks to both huge investment and changing market conditions. Many game developers are looking for alternatives to Unity, for example, while others want to find a solution that won't shoehorn them into an unaccountable subscription-based system. Godot is gaining momentum and is set to become a major open source project in the same league as Blender, Firefox, and Linux itself. While there have been a number of commercial games that were created in Godot, there have been very few that were sold and released as open source. This has deprived the Godot community of some much-needed commercial game exemplars that can be picked and either learned from or used directly as the foundation for a new game. ROTA, however, is now one such title.

ROTA is a two-dimensional platform where the background world is rotated 360 degrees as you travel over 90-degree bends in the terrain. It features beautiful, cartoon-pixel-art-style graphics, addictive gameplay, and exceptionally smooth animation. Each level is a problem that needs to be solved as you navigate and move between worlds. Most importantly, however, its main developer has been inspired to release the project as open source – assets and all. This was because they had previously learnt so much from open source games related using the PICO-8 games engine, and the brilliantly tough platform Celeste in particular, and wanted to pay something back. The source includes media, maps, and world designs, with the source folder containing everything created in Godot. It's a brilliant way to study the game's movement, physics, and pixel-perfect collision mechanics, and the developer has even created a YouTube video on how to edit or create your own levels in Godot. This might be the perfect way to get started in games development, and the best possible way of starting to learn your way around Godot.

Project Website

https://github.com/HarmonyHoney/ROTA

ROTA is available to buy and demo on Steam, but it's also an open source project that can be loaded and edited in Godot.