Pete Kellock's Rhythm Engine

The Rhythm Engine is a presentation of a continuous multi-dimensional rhythmic space, originally designed by Pete Kellock in the mid nineties at ISS, Singapore.

The engine performs rhythms using a number of voices, each playing the role of a single drum. What each voice does can be controlled by a bunch of continuous sliders. A number of voices playing a few different drums can make interesting rhythm patterns that you can manipulate at a high level using this interface.

Presets and the morpher

When you arrive at a set of voices and slider settings for them that you like, you can save it in one of the "presets". Just click on one of them.

The presets you store can be used in the "morpher" and you can explore the space between your presets by manipulating the red handle in the morpher.

You can drag any green preset into a morph to include it in the mix. To remove it, shift-click on the preset within the morpher. Thereafter, while the rhythm is playing, you can manipulate the red morpher handle to move in the space between your presets in a limited way (it's a 2D morpher after all).

Voice controls

A very brief description of the controls follow. This is just a rough guide. Have fun playing with them and figuring out how to make interesting stuff with them instead of reading this :)

phase

Time shifts the pattern being generated by the voice according to a sense of "progressive weirdness".

straight

Increasing this will result in a normal straight 4/4 kind of beat pattern.

offbeat

Increasing this will cause strokes on cycle times that are offbeat relative to the "straight" pattern.

funk

A pattern of the form 3+3+3+3+2+2.

random

Amount of randomness in the pattern.

ramp

Increasing this will cause the voice to ramp up during the cycle.

threshold

The above sliders determine the "strike velocity" of the drum. This parameter specifies which values of the resultant velocity will be discarded. Only values above this threshold will be audible.

volume

Am ordinary volume control on the voice.

Technical info

This implementation makes use of a bunch of bleeding edge browser technologies. Frankly, it is a pleasure to see all these work together fairly well and I didn't bleed all that much.

1. The Web Audio API for all the sound heavy lifting.
2. 2D Canvas API for the slider and morpher controls.
3. window.localStorage
4. FileSystem and Quota APIs for cached drum sample storage.
5. Drag-n-drop API for working with presets.
6. requestAnimationFrame for timing, though this is only temporary. It doesn't provide enough audio accuracy and I'll likely switch to a JavascriptAudioNode to do the timing instead.

TODO

This implementation doesn't include all elements of the original Rhythm Engine. Here's what's been left out.

1. Swing parameter
2. Time signature needs to be exposed in the UI.
3. Simple/Comound time structure needs to be exposed in the UI.
4. Chords! The engine is most fun when it also plays chord patterns and I need instrument samples for use with the web audio api. (rant)Damn, some things are just easier with MIDI.(/rant)
5. Lonce Wyse has made some improvements to the RE in the area of swing. Yet to incorporate those.
6. The morpher won't work with only one preset in the scene. This situation was called "z-morphing" or "morphing to zero" in the original RE. This is to be handled with everything going to zero as the morpher gets more distant from the sole preset (plus a few details). That isn't implemented yet.