Highly Portable Generative Music 1

I've found a pretty good way to make Koan Pro generative software truly portable: it's the Audigy 2ZS sound card from Creative Labs.

Here's how it works: Koan Pro is a very user-friendly, powerful generative music (aka algorithmic music) program from SSEYO in the UK that generates a multichannel midi stream from random numbers in a variety of ways. Most laptops (perhaps all of them) have frankly lousy soundcards with cheap, tinny sounds. The Audigy 2ZS is a tiny (2 x 4") card that fits in the PCMCIA slot, and connects to female 1/8" stereo audio jacks. No additional power source is required beyond the laptop's power. With the associated software, and included "soundfonts", it can carry out respectable midi rendering into good general midi sounds, and provides additional effects (pitch shifting, various reverb, distortion, etc.) on top of this. By downloading other "soundfont banks" and adding them to the soundfont bank library, the midi output can be rendered into a wide variety of other instrumental and synthetic sounds beyond the general midi sounds provided with the card. The card costs ~ $100, and many soundfonts are available free on the internet. You can also make your own soundfonts from samples.

The downsides: the thing is fragile (mine is no longer fully functional after a few months), and there is no midi in or out on the card. But it packs a lot of features into a highly portable package.

Keepin' it random,
Diastereo