Humusbeta

The Metapad

The Metapad morphs the whole patch with one gesture. You store snapshots of every knob, place them on a surface, and drag a cursor between them: the patch blends towards whichever snapshots are near.

The idea is Ross Bencina's Metasurface (Bencina, 2005). The Metapad keeps that gesture and makes the cursor a parameter of its own, so it can be mapped, automated and captured.

Snapshots

Open the Metapad from its button on the window rail. New Snapshot stores the settings of every knob in the patch and then waits for you to say where it goes: the surface lights up, a ghost of the new point follows the pointer, and one click drops it there; keep the button down to drag it into place. Esc leaves the snapshot in the list without putting it on the surface. New Snapshot also switches Interpolate off, so the click places the point instead of morphing away from the settings you just captured. Right-click a point to recall it, store the current settings into it, or delete it.

Morphing

Switch to Interpolate and drag. Every knob moves towards the snapshots nearest the cursor, so the space between a dark, still corner and a bright, busy one becomes an instrument of its own.

Morph parameters lists every knob the morph can move. Untick one to keep it where you set it by hand, whatever the cursor does.

When the patch has pods, Morph parameters starts with one row per pod. only makes the pad move that pod and nothing else; out makes it leave that pod alone; everything on the first row puts every knob back under the pad. So one pad can be the drums' pad for one song and the whole patch's for the next. Each press is one undo step, and an organism added to a pod after your first snapshot is picked up when you press.

Playing it live

  • MIDI X and MIDI Y put the cursor on two controllers, or an XY pad.
  • Performance capture records the cursor's path, so a morph can be scrubbed, redrawn and played back.

Reference

Bencina, R. (2005). The Metasurface: Applying natural neighbour interpolation to two-to-many mapping. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (pp. 101-104). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1176701