Artificial Neurons for Music and Sound Design (5-minute lecture video)

Video presentation I made for the 2024 “Explainable AI for the Arts” (XAIxArts) Workshop, part of the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference 2024.

A lot of these points I’ve discussed elsewhere (see playlist below), but this quickie presentation brings together these ideas, focusing on the aesthetic potential of this approach.

Check out the complete playlist for more hands-on creation of neurons and neural networks:

Reaktor 6 Matrix Mixer

Building a matrix mixer in Reaktor 6 primary, and then exploring its possibilities for sound design.

I’ve been a little obsessed with matrix mixers lately, because they feed my desire for unique sound design applications (and feedback). A matrix mixer is a combiner module that can route multiple inputs to multiple outputs, often allowing you to adjust how much of each input signal goes to each output. While sophisticated, they’re pretty easy to build in Reaktor or other software, and can maybe be useful for some next-level synthesis applications.

0:00 Intro / Why Matrix Mixers?
1:18 Starting the Build, Simple Sine Oscillator
2:50 Matrix Mixer Macro
3:55 Visible Ports for Panel Patching
5:37 First Mixer of the Matrix
9:46 Duplicating It for the Matrix
10:48 Matrix Mixer Basics
12:05 Delay and Feedback
15:29 Adding a Second Delay
18:44 END OF LESSON. Unless…
19:59 Adding Ring Modulation
21:43 Building a Complex Patch
24:45 Other Examples of Implementation
25:58 Final Thoughts, Next Steps

Beginning Reaktor 6 Tutorials: