Chinenual

Music and Software

About

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Chinenual is Steve Tynor. I’m a software engineer and musician.

My music is mostly electronic - ranging from ambient to down-tempo, even retro electronica. I occasionally try my hand at acoustic music for piano, choir and orchestra. Some of my music relies on software or hardware I’ve built.

I also build custom instruments – virtual instruments (VST/AU), VCV rack modules and even hardware MIDI devices. Contact me if you’d like me to build you something!


Latest Post

20-Oct-2024

Music: Discretion

Feeling groovy

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Music

My music is mostly electronic - ranging from ambient to down-tempo, even retro electronica. I occasionally try my hand at acoustic music for piano, choir and orchestra. Some of my music relies on software or hardware I’ve built.

My studio is mostly virtual, relying on software instruments running in Logic Pro or VCV Rack. Occasionally, I break out my vintage DK Synergy (for which I wrote an editor/librarian to replace its original CP/M based software).

You can find my music at



Software and Hardware Projects

In a past life, I developed expert systems, compilers and high performance runtimes, back-office financial software, smart grid infrastructure and a variety of other enterprise scale backend systems.

These days, I work mostly on music-oriented projects. Here are some of the recent ones.

Synergize is a full-featured librarian and patch editor for the vintage DK Synergy synthesizer supporting both the original hardware and the new Synergia virtual instrument. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux and offers a modern graphical alternative to the original CP/M based SYNHCS software. It adds a number of related utilities:

  • a TouchOSC based iPad control surface offering a GDS-like editing experience
  • a Yamaha DX7 to Synergy patch conversion utility
  • a Synergy SYN Sequencer to MIDI converter

go-scala - a Go translation of the Surge project’s C++ based microtuning / Scala file library

An updated hardware adapter for Iasos’s “Golden Harp”. Iasos is, by most accounts, one of the originators of New Age music. A mutual friend got us together so that I could help give this unique instrument a new lease on life.

The original instrument relied on an old Commodore 64. This project involved deep reverse engineering Iasos’s harp controller hardware. It is a small Arduino-based hardware device that intercepts events encoded over a high speed serial connection and converts to standard MIDI. The new adapter improves on the original by supporting a configurable number of scale presets that Iasos can now easily change in real time.

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A VST/AU MIDI effect that provides random arpeggiation without ever repeating a note. The musician can control the rate of the arpeggiation (which can be very slow to simulate things like wind chimes, or very fast – about 10ms, which Iasos calls the “crushed glass” setting). There are also controls for randomizing the note length and velocity of the arpeggiated notes.

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A VCV module and expander that converts up to 10 tracks of polyphonic control voltages to MIDI and produces a standard multitrack MIDI file which can then be imported to any DAW.

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A VST/AU audio effect with two bandpass filters that track MIDI from two MIDI channels and filter side-chained audio. This allows the musician to “strum” the Golden Harp to control the bandpass frequencies. The two filters are independent, so both strips on the harp can be strummed independently.

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A new module, DrumMap, converts input percussion/drum gate inputs to pitch outputs corresponding to user-selectable General MIDI conventions. Use it to produce a polyphonic “drum track” with MIDIRecorder, or connect it directly to an external drum machine or DAW with VCV core’s CV-MIDI.

Click on the input pair label to change the MIDI note to be associated with that gate.

Produces three polyphonic outputs V/Oct, Gate and Vel suitable for directly importing into the MIDIRecorder or sent out through CV-MIDI.

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The Tintinnabulator produces a harmonized pitch from an input chord and melody using Arvo Pärt-style tintinnabulation where a harmony note is selected from a reference chord. Pärt’s music tends to use simple triads for his tintinnabulation but the module allows you to specify any set of notes as the reference.

The module supports several variants of the harmonization - select first available pitch or next one, in both upwards or downwards direction. Also supports bidirectional tintinnabulation, where every other note switches between upward or downwards selection. An Octave offset can be used to offset the harmony up or down from the reference melody line.

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NoteMeter is a polyphonic metering module that displays note names from V/Oct inputs. If the input voltage does not align exactly with a note voltage it indicates the deviance from the closest note as “cents”.

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Inv produces a chromatically inverted V/oct pitch relative to a specified “pivot” pitch. Can be combined with a quantizer to approximate diatonic inversion.

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Splits a polyphonic cable and optionally sorts the channels, with possibility to share sort criteria with another SplitSort or MergeSort. Linked sorting is inspired by Aria Salvatrice’s Splort module.

Merges a set of monophonic signals into a polyphonic cable and optionally sorts the channels, with possibility to share sort criteria with another SplitSort or MergeSort. Linked sorting is inspired by Aria Salvatrice’s Smerge module.

Sort polyphonic signals, optionally reusing the same sort order as other inputs. Sorted output remain in sync with one another at the sample level.

A reimagining of Iasos’s “Golden Harp”. Maps a continuous pitch CV input signal to a scale and generates gated notes as you “strum”.

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Harp does not depend on any particular control surface and can be configured to work with a variety of CV input ranges. You can use it with anything that can create a continuous voltage as the musician “strums” (could be a slider on a MIDI control surface, a ribbon controller, heck, even an LFO) I’ve created a simple control surface for the iPad using TouchOSC. The control surface sends both MIDI and OSC messages as the faders move; use whichever works best for you.


Contact

info@chinenual.com