This is the little app named Pianolina. Sitting on the Grotrian Pianos web site, I guess it’s a promotional tool. It’s a neat little generative music device that lets you play around with some piano sounds and come up with some neat stuff with not much effort. It’s the kind of thing you’d spend 5 minutes mucking around with and then move on to the next neat yet useless web thingy. It struck me however that using this little web could be used as a source for generating some ambient music using Ableton Live.

What I liked about this little piano music machine was that it had a really nice blend of both random and controlled elements which is good for generating some spontaneous and novel material. Kinda dull on its own after a while, but more interesting when processed and shaped. The screenshot above is of the set-up I used to make the piece below. The squares here were drifting around very slowly.

Here’s the result of my experiment, below. It took about an hour and a half to put together. (MP3/192k/11 meg)
LINK

Here is the Ableton Live project that I made to create this. Made with Live 7.0.3 using only stock effects plug-ins. It should run fine on most Intel-Macs.

I also used a neat little piece of software from Cycling 74 called SoundFlower. It’s a basic little utility that allows you to send audio between applications on a Mac. Very handy. In this case I was feeding the output of Firefox to Ableton Live which then processed the Grotrian Pianos flash-thingy’s output.

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Byron J. Scullin.
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Ambient Diary Podcast.

Using a web based app plus Live to make ambient music