Kirlian Orbits (Windows Sequencer)
Hey y'all.
While DJing last week and staring at the spinning discs of a Rane System One, I started making plans with myself to put neon stickers on the discs, then use webcams to translate the detection of neon colors into MIDI events to use as a sequencer. Then I decided that such an activity would be a lot of work for a solid 7 minutes of enjoyment, and I'd be better served just making a program that can do it in a much more functional, customizable, and accessible way.
This isn't an original idea, by the way. Circular sequencers date back to Raymond Scott's "Circle Machine" in 1959. There are plenty of similar sequencers out there, but they always left something to be desired for me.
• Attached is a rar file, in that rar file is an EXE file.
• The password for the rar file is KirlianOrbits
• The reason for the password and rar is because your browser may yell at you for downloading an executable file from an untrusted source.
If you want to see, play with, or make fun of of the code, or run this directly via Python, or build your own exe, the source code and full documentation is on my Github.
The exe should be completely self-contained, but I haven't tested it beyond my own computers. I'm not a professional developer, so use at your own risk and I'm crossing my fingers that this works as nicely as it does for me.
Here's the build: Google Drive
Comments (16)
I love this Ben - Are there any plugins for a virtual Piano / keyboard, I don't have mine available !
thanks as always for the cool shit benn ^w^
Managed to build it after two nights of being dumbfounded (I have no experience with python). Turns out: "That means pygame 2.6.1 does not currently provide a wheel for Python 3.14, so pip falls back to building from source. The build system then breaks because it depends on distutils.msvccompiler, which no longer exists in Python 3.14." So install python 3.13 and it'll work. Yes I had to use an LLM to figure this out. Thought I'd mention it in case anyone else is struggling.
I'm getting much more than my browser yelling at me for downloading from an untrusted source. Windows Defender is nuking the rar file as soon as it hits the folder, and it's claiming to have detected a trojan called "Trojan:Win32/Sonbokli.A!cl"
Well, I'm going to add my voice to the crowd, but ask for an AU or .aax version of Kirlian Orbits. I'll even pay extra!
do you happen to know what to do about this problem that keeps showing up, and i keep forgetting the solution: error: externally-managed-environment × This environment is externally managed. something about pip,pipx, venv, ... ok, I forgot to do: python3 -m venv , and . //bin/activate, so fixed. But now I get error : WARNING: No version of JACK found, which is recent enough (jack2>=1.9.11) , Run-time dependency alsa found: NO. Which is ridiculous, because obviously I have Alsa and Jack2 is 1.99.22 . Well, that was interesting anyway...
Have you heard of Tim Thompson? Fantastic music via auto-composition. You should check him out: timthompson.com
Very cool tool man! Love your stuff like this! Always happy to support. Thanks so much :)
Lovely.
Good fun! Thanks for sharing. I used the build_exe.py and it worked perfectly.
This and the concept behind it are stunningly beautiful on top of being utterly fascinating. Thanks Benn!! (I would dare say anyone "picking on your code" instead of improving and sharing is missing the point)
Have you tried Harmony Bloom, Benn??
thank you, awesome
Neat!)
Cool! I like the performance mode. I have ideas for features immediately 😁 I’ll try and run it on my work Mac later!
hi @duncan, could you let us know if you make build for macos?