I was invited to inaugurate Scopitone's 2019-2020 season of creative programming with a two-day workshop on real-time graphics and sound programing techniques with Unity, Ableton Live & Orca.

The goal of this workshop is to give you a starting point. The information presented here is by no means exhaustive, but I've included links to sources and resources for you to further explore the ideas presented. The scripts included in the Unity project are also full of comments, so keep your eyes peeled for hints and explanations in the code.

Find the Unity project here.

Unity Basics

Create a Cube GameObject and add the Rotate.cs component.

⚗️ Play with different Vector3 properties to develop your intuition about how things direct themselves and move around in 3D space.

• x, left-right

• y, up-down

• z, front-back

Rotation happens on the axis of whatever property you choose.

You'll notice that in the script, we are calling .Rotate on the transform - this is another important concept in Unity. The Transform of any GameObject stores its position, rotation and scale.

Other handy concepts to understand when getting started with Unity include meshes, which are basically the skeleton body of any 3D shape and materials, which can be thought of like the skin that sits on top of the skeleton (Mesh,) of any 3D shape.

Orca Basics

Orca is a language comprised of 26 functions, one for every letter of the alphabet. It's also a live coding environment, inside which you can use your arrow keys to move around.

Arrows + ctrl to jump across cells

to jump across cells Shift + arrows to select blocks

+ to select blocks Drag blocks of highlighted code around by holding down alt

Ctrl + i for insert mode to type normally

Add a D (Delay) to your environment and you'll see a flashing star, * , appearing at regular intervals right underneath the letter. This is called a bang, and is a core concept in Orca - everything you do in Orca is at the service of creating bangs. Which represent the sequences and patterns we'll be making as they are sent out from Orca toward other software set up to receive them (Live or Unity for example.)

The D we just set up will flash a bang every 8 frames unless changed through mod, the optional property to the right of the D . Notice there is also a parameter to the left. If you place the cursor on top of this parameter, you'll see a hint about what it does appear at the bottom left corner of your Orca window. Play with adding numbers to either side of D to understand how to speed up and slow down your bang.

In order to interface with other software, we'll need to assign a data format to our bangs. As mentioned, we'll be working with MIDI, which Orca sends using the colon symbol : It comes with five parameters - channel, octave, note, velocity & length. You'll need the first three parameters to make any kind of sound or visual, the last two can be left empty.

An example of this would be:

A brief overview of the MIDI parameters: octave and note refer to the pitch of a sound, while velocity has to do with the loudness/quietness of said pitch. Length is how long the pitch holds before petering out. You can play with these four elements to make some pretty interesting sound and visual variations.

⚠️ The first parameter, channel, represents the address we're sending our bang to be interpreted in other software, which in our case is Live and Unity.

Now that you know how to create and send a bang, I suggest playing around with how you might combine any of the following:

R Random, generates a random value

Random, generates a random value C Count, same idea as D but only counts, no bang

Count, same idea as D but only counts, no bang B Bounce, like Count but goes up and down/back and forth

Bounce, like Count but goes up and down/back and forth T Track, creates sequences of notes to iterate through

Track, creates sequences of notes to iterate through V Variable, stores values and use elsewhere on the grid

Variable, stores values and use elsewhere on the grid K Konkat, outputs a bunch of variables at once

At any point, hit CMD + G and Orca's documentation will appear in the window. Yes, the docs are sparse. All the more reason to experiment, play and see what happens!

Remember to place your cursor over the white and green dots that appear around the letters to see what the parameters are for.

Live Basics

If you're on a PC, make sure you've got LoopMidi already running for this next part.

With Live open in Session View, where all tracks are organised into columns, you can begin setting up the audio samples and effects you want to use. Each column also has a bottom zone with the header Midi From. This is where you set your driver. On a Mac you'll set IAC Bus, on a PC you'll set LoopMidi. Then you choose the channel you want to receive on this track, incoming from Orca.

⚠️ Where Live counts up from Channel 1, Orca counts up from Channel 0. So keep that in mind when you're jumping between software. Live Channel 1 == Orca Channel 0 ...etc.

Now it's time to get curious and creative with sound. Live has a lot to offer in terms of instruments and effects, if you don't yet have your own to play with. Live's integrated samples can be drag-&-dropped onto any MIDI column. For audio samples, you'll need to first create a Simpler instrument, then drag and drop audio effects on top of the instrument, (not the column, but the instrument just below where it says Drop Sample Here.) To add Midi or Audio Effects do the same:

adding a midi sample

adding an audio sample with Simpler sampler

adding MIDI and audio effects to samples

Orca + Unity

Now that we've got our bangs generating some sounds in Live, let's get some visuals going too. We'll use Keijiros very handy MidiJack package to bring MIDI into Unity where we'll be able to outline in code how and what we want to be generated.

Positioning large amounts of objects accurately and beautifully in 3D space is hard, so we're going to lean on an algorithm to do the heavy lifting for us, and tweak from there. If you're not familiar with the Golden Ratio, check out this video for a quick rundown of the math involved in the PhyloPatternGen.cs script. I've also included lots of comments in the script itself to help you develop your understanding of some handy Unity methods like Instantiate() , parent , .lookAt() and setActive() . If you continue creating things with Unity you'll find yourself reaching for these guys often.

Attach this script to a new empty GameObject, which you'll rename Generator. Create a cube and deactivate it by removing the tick from the box in it's inspector. We're deactivating it here because our script will flag any generated cubes to active when we run our scene. This way we start with a blank canvas, and our scene doesn't have a random cube sitting in the middle of our creation.

In the Hierarchy tab, grab the cube and drab it to the Generator's inspector, drop it in the Cube slot of the PhyloGenPattern component and hit the play button. You'll see as many cubes as there are MIDI notes (128) spring to life in your Game View window.

This happens because each cube generated by our script has another script attached to it, called NoteIndicator.cs, which allocates a number from 0 to 128 to each cube, representing a MIDI note number. Whenever you play a note in Orca, a cube with scale up.

⚗️ Try playing around with velocity and length in Orca and see what happens to you cube. What happens if you change the octave?

Just as before, this script is also full of comments and hints about the code. Take some time to look at how the different MIDI channels are targeted. Note that while you must always include the variable noteNumber in the function call, you can omit the channel number.

In other words...

MidiMaster.GetKey(MidiChannel.Ch1, noteNumber) will grab data for any note being played on Channel 1.

MidiMaster.GetKey(noteNumber) will grab data for any note being played on any channel. You can achieve the same result with MidiMaster.GetKey(MidiChannel.All, noteNumber)

Bonus Concepts

Creative coders love simple, smooth animations. I've included some of the communities historically favorite go-to's, Lerp and Perlin Noise for you to experiment with.

Think of Perlin Noise as poetic randomness. When used in the context of animation it adds a life-like quality of movement to objects. In our case, it produces the initial waviness of the cubes. This way even if nothing is firing in Orca, the scene feels alive.

Lerp is short for Linear Interpolation. Think of Lerp as a percentage of a space between two markers. In the scripts folder, I've included a stand-alone script called Lerp. To develop your intuition around this idea, add the script to an empty GameObject, hit play and fiddle with the T property in the inspector. Lerp is really handy for things like mixing colors and animating objects.

Conclusion

You know have all the elements you need to get started making some interesting visual & sound experiments. Once you've created a playground you're satisfied with in Unity, and have selected the sounds you enjoy in Live, you can build your Unity project into an app and perform it with Orca in real-time.

Some hints to push things further: