the well-tempered chaos tool-kit is a mechanical chaos based musical system that seeks to create an intuitive musical relation to the underlying generic structures of chaos in systems. Chaos is generated by the paths of ball bearings that fall though a modular geometrical structure of pins. Depending on the path of a ball the sequencer triggers a sound events, such as CV, MIDI or OSC.
By adding a mechanism to endlessly loop the balls over the pins the chaos can be continuously sampled. Through the repeated sampling of the chaos generated by a pin formation a structure can be recognized. In return the sequencer uses this structure to trigger sound events. By changing the geometrical patterns of the pins different sound event structures can be constructed that resemble or approximate musical patterns.
When the ball loops infinitely the sequencer can become a musical object, that autonomously expresses musical structures. The idea, that simulates randomness can converge through mechanical computation to different statistical distributions structures (Gaussian, non-Gaussian, Boltzmann etc.), is used to express well-tempered chaotic musical events.
for creating the geometry:
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download and install OpenSCAD www.openscad.org/
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run the script to create the STL models
for preparing the arudino:
- download ans install the Arduino-IDE https://www.arduino.cc/
The full project description and build instruction can be found on "hackaday.io" project: https://hackaday.io/project/161589-the-well-tempered-chaos-sequencer