Ostinato

Portland, Oregon 2015-11-29

Description

Ostinato is an experimental art/music/sound app. To compose a song, draw a path among musical nodes in a 3D network or explore a broad range of automatic generation tools.

Concept

After completing Volotic, I continued to imagine novel interfaces for authoring music. In considering ways in which one might “draw” a song, I began to think of creating music using a connect-the-dots metaphor. Beginning with a simple 2D prototype, I continued to expand the idea into a 3D network of nodes with a suite of tools for changing and randomizing the properties of musical lines drawn among them.

”Ostinato”, from the Italian word for stubborn, is a musical term describing a persistently repeating musical phrase.

Development

Ostinato was created using Unity, a game development platform. Graphical assets were authored primarily with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Sounds were generated and edited using Apple Logic Pro X, with some processing done with scripts based on sox.

Interface