Photo courtesy of nodal
August 14th, 2008 – nodal is a small program designed by Jon McCormack and funded by Monash University in Australia. Basically you draw out a path for your music to take and allow the software to come up with something based upon your parameters. It is entirely visual based and does not actually output sound itself. nodal outputs MIDI information which then can be read by whatever synthesizer you choose to use.
While limited for writing mainstream music, nodal is fun to play around with. I could see it being used to come up with ambient music for film. In a way, the visualization is similar to programming diagrams, but instead of defining the functionality of a given piece of code, nodal comes up with its own information based upon your parameters on musical events. Most of the examples on the website sound pretty random so unless you very clearly defined the parameters, I doubt you’d get out anything predictable. It’s a Mac only download and available for free on their website.
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