tl;dr: mutateful enables live coding in Ableton Live's session view. Set up transformations that trigger whenever a source clip is changed, including arpeggiation, shuffling, and ratcheting/retriggering.

With live coding being all the rage this looks like a groovy new idea to bring that excitement and its new possibilities to Ableton. I’m watching closely.

— Matt Black, co-founder of Ninja Tune & Coldcut.

Concept

mutateful reimagines Ableton Live's session view as a spreadsheet-like live coding setup. You add formulas to dynamically shuffle, arpeggiate, constrain, scale, retrigger, and otherwise transform clips in myriad ways. Formulas operate on other clips and/or textual inputs to produce new clips. Unlike most experimental sequencers, mutateful leverages Live's built-in sequencing functionality, allowing you to use any existing MIDI clip as a source of fresh inspiration.

Installing

Go to the latest release for installation instructions and download links for Windows and OS X.

See it in action

Creating beat variations

Demo #1: concat, constrain, transpose

Demo #2: ratchet, shuffle, interleave

A musical spreadsheet

The easiest way to understand what mutateful does is by comparing it to a traditional spreadsheet. Let's say you have two numbers that you'd like to multiply. You put one number in cell A1, another in A2, and in A3 you enter the following (very simple) formula: =A1 * A2. Cell A3 will then contain the result of this operation, and will update automatically whenever A1 or A2 changes.

Since the session view in Ableton Live presents clips in a spreadsheet-like grid, mutateful works the same way, only with more musically interesting commands. For instance, you could shuffle the contents of clip A1 using the contents of clip A2. The pitch values of the various notes in clip A2 would then be used to shuffle the order of notes in A1. Similar to the example above, we would like the result to be inserted into clip A3, but instead of using a spreadsheet command we will use a mutateful command, as follows: =A1 shuffle -by A2. In this example, A1 is a source clip (i.e. the clip that will be transformed), and A2 is the control clip (i.e. the clip that controls the transformation). The latter could be omitted, in which case clip A1 would be shuffled using itself as the control clip. The formula for this would simply be =A1 shuffle.

Usage examples

Creating an arpeggio from a sustained note and a chord

=B1 slice 1/2 transpose 0 7 slice 1/16 1/8 transpose -by C1

This formula does the following: Start with the single sustained note contained in the clip at position B1. Slice it in half, keeping the first note unchanged and transposing the second note 7 semitones up (a perfect fifth). Now, slice the resulting two half-notes into a pattern alternating between 1/16 and 1/8th notes. Finally, transpose this pattern with the chord contained in the clip located at position C1.

Interleaving two clips together

=B1 C1 interleave -mode event

This formula combines the notes contained in the clips located at positions B1 and C1, so that the notes from each clip are played one after the other in an alternating fashion.

Adding retriggering to a beat

=A4 ratchet 1 2 3 6 1 2 5

This formula adds retriggering (also called ratchets) to the beat contained in clip A4. The numbers specify the retrigger amount for each note encountered in the clip. In this case, the first note in the clip will be divided into one (i.e. it will be kept as is), the second one will be divided into two, and so on. When the last number is reached it will loop back to the beginning if there are still unprocessed note events left in the clip.

Ratchet accepts a number of other parameters to scale the resulting retriggers in various ways, including starting fast and going gradually slower towards the end of the note. This can be achieved by adding the -shape parameter and specifying EaseIn (the default is Linear). In addition, the resulting output can be tamed slightly by adding the -strength parameter and setting it to 0.5 (i.e. 50% strength):

=a4 ratchet 1 2 3 6 1 2 5 -shape easein -strength 0.5

Quick command reference

Parameter types

Full documentation

I've started adding more in-depth documentation in our wiki. There's still a long way to go, though.

Be sure to star this repo and/or follow me at twitter.com/KnUpland for updates.

Compiling from source

Pre-requisites

• Git
• .NET Core 3 SDK

Building

Using the command line/terminal, navigate to the src folder inside the mutateful repository and run:

Windows: dotnet publish -c Release
MacOS / OS X: dotnet publish -c Release /p:RuntimeIdentifier=osx-x64 /p:PublishTrimmed=false