Cyrille Martraire

On a Sunday afternoon, fifteen friends, all non musicians but two amateur musicians, joined the machines set in turn, around 8 at a time, to improvise electro or hip-hop rhythmic grooves. Of course there were food and drinks as well.
The goal was to introduce music making in an attractive way: no pressure, no constraint, no [...]

Following my ongoing work on a theory of rhythms and a corresponding physical instrument using lasers, here is a version of the same idea implemented into an Arduino: a generative sequencer. The idea is to generate rhythms, and perhaps melodies, from one rhythm seed, then use mutated copies of it to create something more interesting, [...]

Last week-end I have bought five noise-making plastic toys at a yard sale in Paris; I then ordered knobs and switches from ebay and from a local electronic store. What for? For the purpose of circuit bending of course!
First failure
Out of the four toys, one was already non working when trying with new batteries. Once [...]

Instead of creating music note by note (micro level), we can now create music phrase by phrase (macro level). This is mostly because technology has changed the way we do art in the last century, leading to increasingly obvious appropriation of past work, as collage has done with painting. Below is an overview of this [...]

Here is a collection of tips and tricks to produce current popular genres (Hip-Hop, House and Electro in particular) found freely on the Internet, and presented into the pattern form.
The pattern form
This means each trick or set of related tricks is given an expressive name along with a short description of its intent. Full description [...]

In the post “Playing with laser beams to create very simple rhythms” I explained a theoretical approach that I want to materialize into an instrument. The idea is to create complex rhythms by combining several times the same rhythmic patterns, but each time with some variation compared to the original pattern.
Several possible variations (or transforms, [...]

Here are two videos, pictures and explanations about my experiments to generate rhythmic music using laser beams in a clock fashion.

In this last part, we put ideas into practice to build an instrument dedicated to play solo for electronic music genres. We will use light sensors, buttons and an Arduino board to control MIDI synthesizers in a way that is attractive to both musicians and non musicians.

In this third part we will review examples of non-standard musical instruments.

Musical instruments for musicians and non-musicians, part Two.
In this post we have a look at how making a musical instrument smarter (or more music-aware) can make it much easier, especially for beginners.