Noatikl allows you to tell your computer automatically to create both music and MIDI controller events, based on properties that you define through the user interface.
Yes, that is right: you let Noatikl create the composition for you, in real time, in all its detail! Your job is to use the Noatikl user interface to tell Noatikl which rules to follow, to make the music you want to hear.
The Noatikl user interface allows you to define various musical objects which go together to make your Noatikl composition. When you start your piece playing, the Noatikl music engine analyses the objects, and according to the rules you have defined, chooses for itself the exact notes and MIDI controllers to generate in real time!
The reason this all sounds great, is that at its heart, the Noatikl music engine uses random events in combination with a a powerful set of musical rules. How you interpret what you hear is filtered through your own internal knowledge of music. This combination of chance and logic is what allows Noatikl to keep the music fresh and interesting, and unpredictable.
One of the wonderful features of Noatikl is that you are allowed to change all the properties of the piece in real-time while Noatikl is playing, so you can hear the effect of your rule changes as you apply them. As a result, the process of using Noatikl to create music is very interactive and rewarding.
The process of using Noatikl to create music combines various skills, encouraging you sometimes to simply listen and enjoy or analyse what the music engine is doing.
One of Tim's favourite analogies, is that Noatikl music can be thought of as being comparable to a set of ball bearings traveling down a Bagatelle or Pachinko game. Each time the ball bearings makes their journey, they will combine to travel a different set of paths, bouncing off each other as they go, but the available paths are constrained by the internal physical design and boundaries of the game. In a similar way, music created by Noatikl is governed by an envelope of possibilities. Each time a Noatikl piece plays it will have certain boundaries set by the author, outside which the music will not go. The result is that the music created by Noatikl can be different every time you hear it. That keeps the music fresh and interesting. This is the difference between looking at a photograph of a river, and watching a real live river flowing in nature.
And in case you were wondering, you don't have to use Noatikl as a composer. It is a very, very powerful MIDI event generator with enormous depth; use it to make your mixes hugely more dynamic!
Noatikl also works as a hyperinstrument, accomodating incoming MIDI note events in a customisable way.
