Fantastic video on generative Modular music

Thanks. I learned a new term from that: "generative music". 
 
I've always referred to the process in less-flattering terms. :)
 
He makes a reasonable case for respecting the technique as a legitimate form of musical expression.

Cool video,
 
I've just bought Reaktor and I've been having a load of fun trying to do something similar

Jeff Evans
Except where some people get this wrong is they can easily think that it is confined to timbral changes only but this is very wrong.  A lot of people who set these things up including the guy in the video may have a lack of understanding as to how to setup a pure melodic concept using this approach.

One of the things you find though is that many people out there simply don't care about melody in the sense that we do. To the extent that there are many modular oscillators and other sound sources made today that can't track pitch reliably over more than a very limited range - not because they aren't calibrated properly, but because they simply weren't designed to do so.

Jeff Evans
That is a good point Drew.  I found though that if you used oscillators for the purposes of playing pitches rather than filters, then you usually can get them to track pretty well.  Or I did anyway.  

It's really a design criteria thing. Pretty much all analog oscillators today (except LFO's) are temperature compensated so they don't drift much once warmed up. But whereas some makers will go out of their way to make stuff that can track pretty accurately over 7 octaves or more, other makers come from the "west coast" synth school where that simply isn't a high priority design goal. Because if someone is making drones or music that isn't in tune with itself or other instruments or whatever, pitch tracking doesn't matter to them. 
 
So for those of us would like to be able to play something over the full range of a 5 octave keyboard controller, we learn we need to carefully select appropriate tools for the job. And not just assume that the maker intended for a module to be used that way.

Cool video, thanks!

I'm a big fan of generating pitches (and rhythms) through non-standard methods - I don't see anything wrong with it from a musical standpoint as long as you're using your musical taste to filter out the crap. 
 
I will work obsessively like some demented scientist trying to rig something up and tweak it until interesting music comes out of it. Recently I struck gold by assigning a MIDI kit in Jamstix to a diatonic scale, outputting that MIDI to a synth and then tweaking the Jamstix kit and brain until it made some kind of musical sense. Of course because it's Jamstix you get a lot of very human sounding rhythmic interest, but you have to really work on tweaking the notes of the kit in order to get the kind of tonality you want. And then of course Jamstix comes with hundreds of different styles and grooves with an almost infinite range of accents and fills. If you set it up right (and it takes a LOT of obsessive tweaking) you can get it jamming on a riff or sorts but putting out endless variations so that it sounds like a human player improvising around a theme. 
 
So anyway, I printed out a good ten minutes of Jamstix MIDI like that, and then I wondered what else I could do with it. I have Blocks in the free Reaktor 6 player and it comes with a pretty crazy XY sequencer module, which if left running freely can generate all kinds of melodic craziness, but if you feed it some crazy MIDI to start off with then that MIDI also influences the proceedings. I've not delved into Blocks in detail so I really have no idea how the XY sequencer works, but once again endless tweaking got me some pretty crazy jazz fusion style runs with endless variations. The Jamstix MIDI provided the diatonic tonality, whereas whatever crazy stuff the XY module was doing would take the notes "outside" every now and then. Played together with the riffing synth created earlier and it really did sound like a couple of crazy musicians locked in tight and improvising around each other. 
 
It's not the kind of thing you can get great musical results with off the bat, but if you persevere and tweak things constantly then something great emerges. 
 
My fascination with algorithmic music started when I was a kid - there was a video game called Ballblazer by Electronic Arts (I think) which had this really cool music which had these crazy jazz funk sounding runs in them. I found out that they were fractal generated and it amazed me because it sounded so musical.