Time Machines is a suite of rhythmic tools was designed (with Phelan Kane of MetaFunction) on Ableton’s Max for Live platform to engage with rhythmic concepts in electronic composition and performance.
SLW Coach employs the Swing Latency Weighting Model (Mermikides 2020a) in the transformation of MIDI data, allowing time-feel templates to be applied to portions of – or an entire project. This allows for example, time-feel templates of James Brown’s rhythm section to be applied to otherwise quantized rhythmic material, or conversely such ‘deviations’ to be transformed to other stylistic forms.
Rhythmic Omitter (2017) employs the syncopation models of London (2002), Mermikides (2019) in the real time manipulation of MIDI data. Relative displacement dissonances can be dialled in to MIDI clips exploring the syncopation continuum.
Euclid Junction (2017) allows the automatic ‘maximal smoothing’ of a determined number of rhythmic events within a prescribed cycle. These ‘Euclidean rhythms’ can be applied to multiple musical lines, and specifically to micro-timing groupings within a beat cycle.
The mechanisms of displacement and grouping dissonance (see for example Biamonte 2014, Mermikides 2019) is engaged in Displace Junction (2017). Here MIDI and audio material can be automatically regrouped into multiple layers (from hypermetric down to the micro-timing level), generating complex rhythmic strata and their interactions
Biamonte, Nicole. 2014. ‘Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music’. Music Theory Online 20 (2). https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.20.2.1.
London, Justin. 2004. Hearing in Time. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195160819.001.0001.
