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E-Books

By rolf Kasten

A teacher in maths, physics and languages but most importantly to him; music.

View his website

Rolf is in his 70s has a degree in quantum physics, writes e-books about music, produces multimedia art for the local theatre in the Czech Republic and composes music.

In his own words Rolf describes himself as: 'Being the offspring of a rather large patchwork family of musicians and one of those "after-war" children with English, German and French roots.

Starting his journey into music when he was 4 years old listening to artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, which were strictly forbidden by his family, he started investigating timbre and sound processing.

Generative Music

From: A Systematic Introduction To Making Generative Music With Modular Synths

Index: A Systematic Introduction To Making Generative Music With Modular Synths

Welcome to this first part of a really long series of articles, articles which will enable you to produce not only “just some kind of” generative music, but truly great generative music by following a strategic and efficient but also joyful approach. There are going to be more than 200 pages (well, in my book […]

Chapter 0: About this e-Book & Generative

A foggy environment that does not always makes sense. Do you know this? You see and hear somebody doing something interesting, something beautiful, something you would like to do too. You try. It ́s not what you had expected it to be, it ́s not how you had expected it to be. So you fiddle […]

Chapter 1: Real Randomness vs. Complex Cycles

Chapter 1.1: LFOs When we hear “permanently changing” most of us will surely think of sample and hold units at first.And, yes, S&H units are important engines to drive our generative patches. But what about clock generators and LFOs (the latter being able to serve as clock generators as well)? “Why, LFOs generate regularly repeating […]

Chapter 1.2: Other devices generating regular cycles

Chapter 1.2.1: Looping Envelopes If our envelope generator is equipped with an end-of-cycle output/signal jack, we can make the envelope loop. There are advantages and disadvantages (like always) of using a looped envelope instead of an LFO. The biggest advantage are the two, three, four or more stages of the envelope, which allow us to […]

Chapter 1.3: Randomness, Probability & Stochastic

Chapter 1.3.1: Some Basic Definitions It's time to talk about real randomness now, randomness, which we can add to the networks, that we have build so far. To get at least a whiff of a systematic approach to the surprisingly huge amount of techniques and modules wearing the word “random” in their names I ́d […]

Chapter 2: What to modulate and trigger

This chapter is more a systematic list of documented examples than a recipe of how to set up a complete patch. The aspects of setting up whole (finished) patches are dealt with in chapters 3 and 4. But making music (any kind and with any kind of “toys”) needs a good knowledge of the instrument. […]

Chapter 2.2: Timbre

Chapter 2.2.1: Filters Yes, of course filter. Simple. Common. Boring. No need to say a single word about it any more. Really? Let me start quite simple indeed. I take a VCO, feed its audio output into one filter, but modulate all three parameters (cut-off frequency, resonance and drive) with 3 different LFOs running at […]

Chapter 2.3: Voices & Rhythm

Chapter 2.3.1: Voices Another kind of modulating, of changing the whole development of a patch is switching on and off different voices. We can achieve this with a (square wave) LFO-VCA combination or with dedicated switches (e.g. Gray Code modules). But a far more interesting way to switch between and merge whole voices (audio paths) […]

Chapter 3: Compositional aspects of generative music

Nowhere else than in making music with modular synths do musicality & technique go such tightly hand in hand, does the artist need such deep understanding of both music & physics.

Chapter 3.2: Basic Compositional Techniques

There are three groups of basic compositional techniques, which are not exclusively generative music, but are taught at any school, high school and university, which deals with musical matters, only that we meet them in slightly different shape and forming here in generative music than we are used to see them in other musical styles […]

Chapter 3.3: Specific Compositional Techniques

This chapter is not at all meant to deliver a conclusive enumeration, but rather talks about and shows some especially remarkable and useful techniques. Well, let ́s start now. Chapter 3.3.1: Pitch dependency I talked about relations between normally independent sonic parameters in the last chapter. A quite special relation is pitch dependency of parameters. […]

Chapter 3.4: Certain patch techniques and examples

We are approaching chapter 4 about building blocks of generative patching with this sub-chapter 3.4. But whereas in chapter 4 the more technical and organisational aspects prevail, I ́d like to talk about a few patches of special musical and compositional meaning here in chapter 3.4 at first. Chapter 3.4.1: Switching voices and larger parts […]

Chapter 4: Building blocks of generative patching

When I write “building blocks” in the headline to this chapter, I don ́t mainly think of certain modules. Discussing certain modules will be the matter of chapter 5. I think of certain combinations of modules here, and only exceptionally of a certain module, and only when I want to show a rather uncommon way […]

Chapter 4.2: 5 Faces of Randomness

Face 1: Looping Envelopes Plus S&H Feedback The principle of this face reads in short: a looping envelope (or two, or three ...) trigger a sample & hold module, which not only modulates the pitch of a VCO, but also feeds back its output to modulate the time related stages of the envelope(s). As a […]

Chapter 4.3: Random Harmonies

We can set up a succession of harmonic arpeggios using a sequential switch 1-to-X like in the video behind the following link. Each of the arpeggios belongs to another voice playing another chord and using another timbre. The voices are fed into a mixer, and the mixer channels are randomly activated and deactivated by the […]