I arrived in Montreal yesterday to attend “ICMC2009” and a subsequent Jamoma developer workshop. Today I have been attending the workshop on Genesis.
Genesis is a software environment for musical creation by means of mass-interaction physics network modeling, developed at ACROE in Grenoble. I first learned about Genesis when the Italian composer Giuseppe Gavazza was an artist in residency at USF some years ago. He showed the program to me, and also gave examples of how he had used it to generate and process sound material for a number of compositions and installations.
Back then Genesis was running on Silicon Graphics, mening it less accessible than most software for music production. It has since been redesigned to run on OSX and Linux. Genesis can be used to build physical spring-mass models somewhat similarly to what can be done using PMPD or MSD can do in Max and Pd. There are some differences though:
- Genesis models have to be rendered while PMPD and MSD are realtime.
- Genesis generate audio while PMPD and MSD work on control data.
It was an interesting workshop. Genesis functionality could probably be emulated in PMPD and MSD by writing generated date into buffers, but the really interesting aspect of the workshop was the experience and knowledge about physically modeling accumulated though research and creative projects spanning more than 10 years.
I hope that I’ll be able to continue working with Genesis in the future.
